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Live Q&A with Rick Rule and Albert Lu

Rule Investment Media Jun 18, 2026

Summary

Rule expects peace to drag oil toward the high $50s, a capitulation he says could hand long-term buyers a strong entry point this summer.

A hawkish Fed should keep gold equities weak through August, but he sees major gold miners discounting prices well above published estimates.

Two standout drill holes, one in Argentina's Vicuña district and one in Kazakhstan, landed with only muted market reaction, hinting exploration value is underpriced.

Mining's capital demands explain why most projects reach the market through public equity after years of patient private funding.

For bulk commodity investors, he screens for top-quartile costs and top global returns on capital, not headline production growth.

Key points on Hecla Mining Company

  • Rule calls Hecla an improved company but says he does not own it, and that he is underwhelmed by its history of capital allocation.
  • He says he does not know the current management team well enough or trust them enough to assume they will deliver a good recycle ratio, and that Hecla's recycle ratio has historically been poor across exploration, development and acquisition.

Key points on Aris Mining Corp

  • Rule flags the drill hole released a few days ago in central Kazakhstan, inside a known porphyry copper belt, as a potential very large discovery if it can be repeated, because it hit in the middle of a geophysical target with grade over width that suggests a porphyry district.
  • He discloses a conflict of interest: he took part in a recent Aris financing and has been a shareholder for some time, and asks viewers to weigh his enthusiasm accordingly.
  • He contrasts Aris with ATEX, which he calls a mine with a near-demonstrated five-year build, while Aris is an early drill hole story that can lose 50% of the money put in or, if it delivers, return about 20 times, so the two are 'comparing grapes with watermelons'.
  • He says Aris is priced fairly, warning that many holders expect a stair-step-to-heaven path without understanding porphyry exploration, the lead time, or the cost of capital of operating in Kazakhstan.
  • He argues the muted market reaction to the result matters as much as the result itself: the market is not paying up for discoveries, and he notes the geopolitical discount attached to a location whose name ends in 'stan'.

Key points on Gogold Resources

  • Rule expects GoGold to be entering what he calls the golden runway, the window from the first shovel in construction to economic completion that he describes as the most predictable upswing in a gold miner's history, now that the first underground permit has been granted.
  • He expects that permit to be the first of several for the district, and says he believes the exploration effort has built a multi-mine district that GoGold will control.
  • He frames the open question as what happens between now and the point at which the permitted mine goes into construction, which he wants to follow closely.
  • He uses GoGold as his benchmark for exploration success, saying the company's drilling became predictive a couple of years ago and that is when it started adding ounces quickly.

Key points on AbraSilver Resource

  • Rule says the same test he applies to Banyan applies to AbraSilver: the company has to understand its ore body well enough that exploration becomes predictive.

Key points on Elemental Royalty

  • Rule dismisses the idea that Elemental Royalty faces regulatory risk from collateral damage around Tether's offshore stablecoin activity: the only path he sees to a problem is Tether selling shares to cover a regulatory issue, which would hit the share price.
  • He says Tether is the largest shareholder and will become a larger one, and that he believes the company has deployed its money well.
  • He notes Tether has told management to be more aggressive, which widens the deal universe well past the sub-$50 million transactions the company was previously limited to by its small size.
  • He finds the strategy interesting because Tether has said publicly that the price-to-value gap between the largest, mid-tier and junior royalty and streaming companies could close if several juniors merged into a mid-tier company.

Key points on Banyan Gold Corp

  • Rule calls Banyan's latest drill results all good and says the company is hitting on all three cylinders at once: grade, tonnage and regional exploration.
  • He credits good drilling density, and in particular work in the guts of the deposit that suggests the team understands how the deposit formed well enough to start adding grade alongside tonnes.
  • He says the drilling is beginning to become predictive, which he calls a fulcrum point for adding ounces, and notes Banyan reached that point earlier than most companies do.
  • He keeps the caveat that grade remains a live concern because it drives recoveries, metallurgy and ultimately the upfront capital cost, and says the summer of 2026 will show whether the fulcrum point has really been reached.

Key points on NGEx Minerals Ltd

  • Rule refers back to earlier discussions of the Vicuña district in Argentina, which he framed at the time in the context of Lundin Mining and NGEx, as a region that keeps producing exploration discoveries.

Robert Friedland's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Rule cites Friedland's 22 years of running Ivanhoe privately before going public as one of three examples, with Tom Kaplan's Sunshine Mining and Ross Beatty's Polish assets, of mining businesses whose capital needs eventually force them into public markets.

Rick Rule's takeaways

  • Top takeaway On the apparent US-Iran agreement around the Strait of Hormuz, Rule expects oil to fall further than the market assumes if the peace holds, because 90 to 120 days of very high prices has destroyed demand in poor countries rather than added supply; he says a break below $60 would produce a pronounced negative reaction in oil stocks and tells investors to be ready, arguing that decline is the entry point for anyone holding a bullish long-term view on shortages caused by roughly a billion dollars a day of underinvestment in sustaining capital.
  • On gold he welcomes a lower price because he wants to buy more, argues a hawkish new Fed chair is bad for gold through a stronger US dollar, and expects gold equities could sell off through August 2026 while noting major gold equities already discount $3,900 to $4,000 gold against published earnings estimates of $3,300.
  • He defines himself as a credit analyst first, focused on the liability side of the balance sheet and bond covenants, says his expertise is specific to natural resources and conventional financials rather than general, and holds that money is made on the delta between price and value.
  • He says the muted market reaction to the recent spectacular drill holes means the exploration sector is not paying up for discoveries, which he expects to let buyers pick up confirmation holes cheaply this summer.
  • He argues natural resources are extraordinarily cyclical and you must be a contrarian to do well, enduring several years of poor returns, and that exploration is psychologically easier than technology because a $50,000 drill hole can find a $20 billion deposit against odds of about one in 3,000.

Eric Sprott's takeaways

  • Top takeaway The lesson Rule took most from Sprott is not to be afraid to be right: to average up on success when the gap between price and value widens, using the Aurelian example where Sprott said the stock was cheaper at $4 than at $1 because there was more data.
  • Rule portrays Sprott as someone who treats a loss as a necessary cover charge for playing the game, pointing to more than a hundred positions that cost him over 50% and to watching his portfolio fall about 85% between 2011 and 2015 without capitulating at the bottom.
  • He credits Sprott with being genuinely nice, describing a non-zero-sum approach to deals and a wish for the management teams who made him rich to get very rich, supported through good times and bad.
  • He credits Sprott with real technical depth, describing a chartered accountant background that sits behind his macro talk and makes him very strong on balance sheets and income statements.
  • Rule applies Sprott's framing to Aris Mining, asking how big it could get rather than how to de-risk it, and cites Sprott's backing of Kirkland Lake through Fosterville as a one-way trade that made him more than C$500 million.

Jonathan Goodman's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Rule credits Goodman, who he notes has lectured at the Rule Classroom, as the largest and a supportive shareholder in Saturn Metals, and says that backing is what makes the stock more attractive to him.
  • He adds that if the market does not give Saturn a proper market cap, he would not be surprised to see Saturn absorbed into Dundee, and that Goodman, the person who first drew his attention to Reunion, is the son of Ned Goodman, a long-time mentor of his.

Albert Lu's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Lu runs the Q&A and presses Rule on the Canadian oil and gas comparison, on the top lessons he learned from Eric Sprott, and on LunR Royalties, which Rule initially misread as a different company.
  • He also asks Rule about the new energy content in the Boca Raton conference, which Rule says is a starter kit aimed at 15% to 20% of the conference by 2027, and closes the session by pointing viewers to the Rule Classroom symposium site.

Ross Beatty's takeaways

  • Top takeaway Rule uses Beatty as the clearest example of an operator who cannot sit still: roughly 15 years ago Beatty staked the down-dip strike extension of a major Polish copper-silver belt, one of the greatest in history, after Lumina, Pan American and about a dozen other ventures, because he could not resist the temptation.
  • He says Beatty operated those Polish assets with private funds, his own money included, for 15 to 20 years before taking them public, alongside Tom Kaplan's Sunshine Mining and Robert Friedland's Ivanhoe, as proof that mining capital needs eventually outgrow private fortunes.
  • He notes Beatty genuinely retires from June through September while the weather is good on the BC coast and goes back to work in October when the rain starts, and that Rule and their peers are simply not good at retiring.