Rick Rule says the dollar is on track to lose 75% of its purchasing power, just like in the 1970s. Here’s why that means Gold could QUADRUPLE and Silver could EXPLODE!
In this exclusive interview from the 2025 Rick Rule Natural Resources Symposium, legendary investor Rick Rule explains how America’s soaring debt, unfunded liabilities, and negative real yields are fueling a new precious metals supercycle.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- Why gold is insurance (not an investment) and how Rick measures his wealth in gold
- His three-bucket strategy: insurance (gold), investments (gold stocks), and high-risk speculation (junior miners)
- How silver historically outperforms gold when momentum builds, and why he expects to see it one more time
- Why rare earths are misunderstood and where Rick sees opportunity
- Practical lessons on speculation psychology: how many stocks you should really own
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Rick Rule 0:00
At some point in time, the generalist investor comes down into the precious metals market, having been attracted by gold’s momentum, and then perhaps, of its perhaps because of its unit cost, silver takes over the leadership. And when it does, as you know, it’s truly, truly, truly dramatic. I’m 72 years old, and I want to experience that sort of quantum escalation at least one more time in my career, and silver gives it to me.
Trey Reik 0:30
Greetings from the 2025 edition of the infamous Rick Rule Natural Resources symposium, which we all look forward to Rick. Thank you very much. My name is Trey Reich of wealthion, and we’re here this year with our partners from SCP resource finance, anticipating launching a broker dealer in coming months, as soon as finro approves our application, and we’re excited about the opportunity to offer SCP finance companies in the United States. So we’ve enjoyed meeting with some of our clients here and introducing this effort today. We actually have Rick himself. And thank you very much for stopping by. It’s going to steal my first question to my interview, which is, how long have you known Rick, and how many of these conferences you’ve been to? And we’ve gotten a full range of answers up to, I think 25 Rudy Frank was about the top. But I guess the better way to start this conversation is to ask you, how do you feel this year’s conference is going,
Rick Rule 1:37
you know, Trey, we’ve put on this conference, I think, for almost 30 years. And if you make it a little bit better every year, at the end of 30 years, it gets to be pretty good, good for a bunch of reasons. You make mistakes, and you learn what doesn’t work, and you throw those away better. However, because you build a franchise, we have a returning cadre of attendees in the live conference, over 300 strong in the live stream, over 400 strong that come back year after year. You know, Drake, because you were on Wall Street, that in a conference like this, the idea that all of the wisdom emanates from the dias to the crowd is ludicrous. The crowd themselves has an awful lot of wisdom. And what’s made this conference work for 30 years is the franchise built around the audience and the audience first. That’s worked very, very, very well for us. I have a great staff, some of whom have been with me for 30 years, which is to say they were at the first conference. They’re here today, so I can worry about making the content of the conference better, while the whole back end of the conference is taken care of by veterans, which allows me to concentrate on what delivers better content value for the attendees.
Trey Reik 2:44
And when you talk with attendees this year, what are they most interested in? I hear gold, gold, gold. Not a lot of copper, not a lot of anything else. And I’m hearing some pretty, pretty rich numbers. You know, we’re getting up to the average four to 5000 type of expectation
Rick Rule 3:01
I suspect that people have harbored. Well, let me rephrase that. I suspect the people who are attracted to this conference have harbored those expectations for years, but they haven’t had the courage to express them as a consequence of the fact that gold’s advance has been muted. But you know, that’s interesting because I remember two years ago at this conference, being asked by one of the people in the audience when gold was finally going to move. And you know, Trey, I scratched my chin sagely, and I said, I think gold’s going to move in the year 2000 it’s up 9% compounded for 25 years. People’s expectations, I think, were inflated as a consequence of the decade of the 70s. And the fact that something that an asset class was up 9% compounded, didn’t register to people as a move 50% now people are getting interested in the consequence of that is that they have the courage to make other other projections, which I believe they harbored all along.
Trey Reik 3:59
So that’s a great point. The gold price was up, I think, 27% in 24 and so far in 25 we’re up another 26 or so. We were up 35 when we touched 3500 This is, I sort of know what your answer is going to be, but I have to ask, Are you surprised that the gold price is doing this well this year after doing so well last year,
Rick Rule 4:23
I’m not because I was surprised that gold hadn’t moved further, faster, earlier. My belief, and Trey, you and I have discussed this over dinner. My belief is that gold does well when people are concerned about the maintenance of their purchasing power in US dollars. I’ve been concerned about that for a very long time. The arithmetic that concerns me is not expressed by the CPI, which I don’t think is a good index. So I’ve been surprised by the muted response of gold. Hitherto, I didn’t know, as you know, because we talked about it when gold was going to move, but it seemed to me like an inevitability. As you and I both have talked about, I have a flaw in that. I often confuse the words imminent with inevitable. But no, I haven’t been surprised at all,
Trey Reik 5:11
and I know that you’re fairly focused on debt and the macro situation. Do you think that the dollar standard system has already begun evolution to a new global monetary reserve. Or is that overstating it?
Rick Rule 5:28
I think it’s way overstated. When I talk about the deterioration of purchasing power of the gold, I’m talking about an absolute sense, not in a relevant sense. Relevant sense, I think, relative to other currencies, gold will do well. Franz picks it. There’s a lot of Ruin left in it. In a country that’s great. Ruefully, I agree with that. I believe that gold will be the world’s reserve currency for the balance of my life. For the record, I’m a healthy 72 year old, but I think it’s hegemony will reduce.
Trey Reik 5:56
When I look at the dollars hegemony, yes, it’ll
Rick Rule 6:00
be reduced. I think the US government is doing their best to destroy the US Treasury as a savings instrument, politicizing it, debasing it. But what are the alternatives? My friend, our friend, Doug Casey once said, The dollar is an I owe you nothing, but the who the Euro is a who owes you nothing. And I mean, the other analogy is the prettiest mayor at the slaughterhouse. I’m not concerned about the dollar relative to other mediums of exchange. I’m worried about the dollar as a storehouse of my own wealth. I personally trade. I’m telling you this your audience. You know this. I personally save in gold. I personally maintain liquidity in dollars. Those are two different statements.
Speaker 1 6:44
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Trey Reik 7:08
now. Very similar to Graham Williams, he was saying the same thing when we discussed this in terms of, you know, is there a target where you would sell your gold? And his answer was, when there’s something I want to buy with it, and I think it’s a good value, which is an interesting that’s
Rick Rule 7:25
precisely what happened in 2010 now, I didn’t catch the top. I never do, but there were other circumstances where stuff appeared to be to be much cheaper. The consequence of that is that I made the swap. I do consider gold to be a form of liquidity, because I’ve proven to myself over for years that when the time comes, I’m not psychologically indisposed to selling it. One of the things I do, which I think your audience might find of interest, is that beginning in the year 2000 you know, that was a momentous time, and I had a discussion with myself, where did I want to go? What did I want to do? One of the things that I began to do was to keep an informal alternative Ledger in gold, my net worth, my income, my expenses, in gold, rather than in the US dollar. And for that part of my ledger, when I look at what things cost today, I wish I had been all in gold, some stuff like rooms at this hotel or a Big Mac or a car are really cheap. If you measure them in dollars, they’re anything but cheap. But understanding that the dollar gold exchange ratio was $250 to an ounce of gold at that point in time, if you measure if you equalize the numerator and the denominator, if you measure your savings in gold, you’re struck by the deterioration the purchasing bar of the US dollar. And you’re talking and you’re surprised by the steady reduction in the actual price of many goods and services on a global basis, if you’re valuing them in a constant. It’s a really interesting consciousness raising exercise.
Trey Reik 9:02
If gold is what you perceive as you know a cash equivalent and saving, what? How would you position gold equities in a portfolio or in a life?
Rick Rule 9:15
Gold, for me, is insurance and savings. Gold stocks are investments. I don’t own gold to make money. I own gold to maintain liquidity and maintain my purchasing power. I’m good at buying gold stocks. I’ve worked at it for 50 years. It’s my craft that’s different. Owning gold stocks is one of the ways that I increase my sort of gold but they’re different businesses. Gold doesn’t require any work, just like a life insurance policy doesn’t require any work other than paying the premiums. So I regol them. I regard them as very, very, very different asset classes in a different part of my life. In addition to being an investor in gold mining companies, I’m a speculator in the juniors and relative to other people, I’m at. Actually a better speculator than I am an investor. I’m willing to do the work. I have 50 Years of mistakes, but there are three different buckets, insurance, investment, speculation,
Trey Reik 10:10
and that speculation bucket, I think you would always recommend people have a very, very long time frame correct
Rick Rule 10:19
yes and be willing to do the work. The more speculative the entity, the more psychological tolerance that you have to have for perturbation, and the more willingness you have to work. I have as I think you know, Trey graded 10s of 1000s of investor portfolios for free over the years. I ask people to submit them to me. I grade them for free. I’ve taught a lot and I’ve learned a lot, and I ask investors to limit the number of speculations that they have in their portfolio to the number of hours per month they’re willing to work on their speculations, not got a hunch, bet a bunch. Read the quarterly filing statements, read the proxy statement, read the resource statement, read the insider filing statement. If you are willing to work 10 hours a month, by 10 hours a month, by the way, I don’t necessarily just mean listening to podcasts, but rather reading filing statements, doing something like that, then you could own 10 stocks, but many of the portfolios that I’ve graded have had 65 or 70 stocks, and some of the stocks are unpronounceable to the holders. That’s not good.
Trey Reik 11:29
The I know, the feeling. I happen to know that you have a soft spot in your heart for silver. It’s not exactly you know gold in terms of saving and that type of thing. But how would you position, you know, silver in its role in a portfolio
Rick Rule 11:47
Trey? I’ll start by making a confession, whenever I criticize speculators at a conference like this, if Bonnie, my wife, was present, she starts laughing, and she says, By the way, all the money that Rick invests conservatively he made speculating wildly. Yes, I have a fondness for it. I’ve participated in three precious metals bull markets in my life. This will be the fourth, and at some point in time, and I’m never smart enough to say why, you probably are actually given your competence in technical analysis. As an example, at some point in time, the generalist investor comes down into the precious metals market, having been attracted by gold’s momentum. And then perhaps, if it’s perhaps because of its unit cost, silver takes over the leadership. And when it does, as you know, it’s truly, truly, truly dramatic. And although I don’t need to make more money, I want to make more money. I really, truly enjoy the game. I’m 72 years old, and I want to experience that sort of quantum escalation at least one more time in my career. And silver gives it to me. When I came into business, I’m older than you, as you know, in when I came into business in the 1970s I witnessed an amazing silver market. The stuff went from a buck 30 in 1970 to 50 bucks in 1981 one stock that I was aware of, but I was too dumb and too poor to buy. It was Coeur d’Alene. It went from 10 cents, this is not a typo, 10 cents in 1970 to $65 in 1981 and that stuck, that stuck in a young man’s mind, but I didn’t participate. But as I think you know, in the later part of the 80s, the early part of the 90s, which was a spectacular silver mark that people forget, I was involved in silver standard, which we took from 72 cent financing with a full warrant. Thank you. To six years later, $45 and Pan American Silver from 50 cents rospigny was too cheap to give me a warrant to $45 those two moves from below a buck to 45 bucks in six years, stuck with me and have stuck with me forever. We are, I believe, coming into a precious metals bull market that will resemble the best of the prior markets, and if past is Prolog that same performance. I’m not saying $1.30 to $50 don’t get me wrong, but that same sort of relative outperformance silver to gold and then silver stocks to silver, I think we’ll see in this market, and I’d like to play it.
Trey Reik 14:22
So you made the comment that you think we’re heading into a very important precious metals bull market. So I’m going to pin you down, since we just went from, you know, 1800 to 3300 What do you see that excites you about the next five years, as opposed to the past three.
Rick Rule 14:41
You got to give me the next 10, not five. I believe that the analog to the deterioration in the purchasing power of the US dollar that we’re going to experience is the 1970s in the 1970s according to the Office of Management Budget, the US dollar lost 75% of its purchasing power. This is not. Old, fat libertarian Rick Rule saying this, this is the office, the Congressional Budget Office. I believe that because of the accumulated debt and deficit, particularly off balance sheet debt, entitlements, and the unfunded entitlement liabilities, that the purchasing power of the US dollar over the next 10 years is going to decline by 75% again. I don’t know how it will be reflected in the gold price, but the easiest thing for me to say arithmetically is that the increase in the gold price will mirror the deterioration of purchasing power of the US dollar. If that is more or less right, then the gold price goes up four fold from here. People say to me, Rick, like give your head a shake. Gold has already gone. Already gone. It’s already up 40% if the analog is the decade of the 70s, let’s assume that the move in gold price from $35 to $100 was a dead cat bounce off the restriction the gold price. And let’s say that the move in the gold price above 550 to 850 was morons piling on that move from 100 to 606 foot move is a pretty good move. And if the cause of it is the perception of the deterioration in the purchasing power of the US dollar, I think it’s absolutely right to assume that the increase in the gold price, the increase in the nominal gold price, could reflect the deterioration in the purchasing power of the US dollar.
Trey Reik 16:31
So do you think that the scenario for the US dollar in the 70s was mostly motivated by inflation, or
Rick Rule 16:41
it was motivated by a negative real interest rate. We fought well you didn’t, well you were you were alive. Then we fought the war in Vietnam, which we lost, and we fought the war on poverty, which we lost, and the highest marginal tax rate United States then, before weird deductions, was 80% so we couldn’t raise taxes. We had to deal with these social obligations. We did it not by changing the nominal value of our obligations, but really by changing the purchasing power of the dollar. The second thing that happened is that the the way that the fear of inflation was expressed in the market, Or put differently, the experience that consumers had with inflation juxtaposed to the rate of that they got on their savings meant that interest rates were sharply negative. We had a 10% measured rate of inflation. We measured it, of course, differently then and people were getting paid 5.5% on their savings accounts. Well, that was reflected pretty clearly by a change in a change in asset allocation from cash and cash equivalents or long term bonds to gold. We have a circumstance today Trey where, if your listeners believe in the CPI. They’re pretty sanguine. You get a 4.5% yield the US 10 year treasury, in a currency where your purchasing power is deteriorating by two and a half percent, you’re getting a 200 basis point real yield. I believe that’s ridiculous. The CPI is not a good measure of the deterioration of the purchasing power of your savings. For one thing, the C p i doesn’t include tax. Do you pay tax? Trey, a little bit. Yeah. If you look back at the basket of goods and services that the right family consumes, say, I don’t want to test your memory. Go too far back, but to the 2020 to today, gasoline prices up two and a half percent, compounded hardly. Mortgage rates doubled. Groceries are a political issue, up 60% and they’re telling you the deterioration the purchasing power of the US dollar is happening at the rate of two and a half percent a year. I mean, what they’re smoking is not legal to transport state to state to state. I believe my
Trey Reik 19:09
favorite CPI stat is they measure the cost of health insurance. Have you heard this one? It’s down by the retained earnings of the insurance companies. That’s literally, when you look it up, it says, we calculate, you know, the cost of health insurance by measuring the retained earnings of the insurance companies. And you’re like, these guys should sell. I mean, and I don’t know if you know this, but the cost of health insurance is actually declining, you know, over the last several years according to metric, which I think is pretty incredible.
Rick Rule 19:41
Yeah, let’s compound the losses and call this again in the CPI anyway, yeah, so
Trey Reik 19:45
outside gold and silver and I, you know, don’t mean to like we’re going through a store window, but in terms of rare earths and uranium, I think you have a soft spot for uranium too, right? Or is. How much of your efforts in the space do you debate devote to those two areas
Rick Rule 20:05
uranium, particularly ones hate it. I have a core portfolio in uranium, which has done extremely well. I had the good sense when uranium was in solid favor to sell enough that I had the rest of my position for free, which is great. About six months ago, the uranium trade fell into real hate. Again, people who had uranium as part of their internet handle were publicly bemoaning the fact that they could spell uranium. The stuff was way, way, way oversold. So I bought some. The hate dissipated. And that position, which I bought as a trading position, I’ve now sold. The reason to own it was hate. The hate dissipated. I sold it. The change in the uranium market. And your colleagues at SCP know this. The change in the uranium market is the pricing in the uranium market is migrating from the spot market to the term market. And that’s profound. Uranium producers will be able to tell, within five years, how much they sell over a 15 year period of time and for how much money. What that means is, if the if the other side of the term contract is an investment grade counterparty Southern Company, Duke Power, Tokyo Electric Power, you will literally be able to take that contract to the bank the cost of capital in the uranium business will become the lowest cost of capital in the resource business on the planet. At the same time, the certainty which lazy securities analysts you’re talking to one are able to forecast future revenues in the uranium business will be more clear than any other commodity. In other words, you won’t have to shade your net present value calculation, because you have no idea what they’ll sell the product for. This is profound. This means that companies that normally, in a normal circumstance, wouldn’t be able to build their deposit, they’d have to sell it, will be able to at least threaten the acquirer with the fact that they can build it themselves. They can obtain financing, because the financing is going to be obtained on Tokyo Electric powers balance sheet, or Duke powers balance sheet. This is hugely important. It’s not sexy, but I’m a lender. I’m too old to care much about sex,
Trey Reik 22:21
and how about the rare earths?
Rick Rule 22:23
What I like about the rare earths is that nobody cares. I mean, nobody cares. They’re not rare. Let’s get that out of the way. They’re not rare because, I mean, they’re rare in the sense that we haven’t looked for them because the Chinese produce them so efficiently, two things, they’re a geopolitical item. Now people want to, want to develop acquisition pipelines outside of China, so rare earths that could be utilized in Korean assembly or Japanese assembly, or European assembly or American assembly, that is rare. The second thing is, and a lot a lot of people know this, the Chinese have had an advantage in terms of cost because they’ve accepted extraordinary environmental destruction as a consequence of their rare earths industry, and that destruction is no longer acceptable in China. The Chinese people and the Chinese government are requiring much, much, much more responsible extraction, which means that the durable competitive advantage that the Chinese enjoyed for 25 years is going away. What I like about that is, when I look at the discussion groups concerning rare earths, they never mention that. I Soros said, find a widely held popular opinion that’s wrong and bet against it. And this feels to me like just that people that pay attention to rare earths don’t pay attention to rare earths well enough to understand that Chinese production costs are rising rapidly and will continue to rise.
Trey Reik 23:51
So that makes rare earths a good investment. Or for
Rick Rule 23:55
me, oh, yeah, for me. I mean, if you’re somebody who requires positive psychological reinforcement, good stuff in the news, or if you have trauma holding stock over a long weekend, forget about it, and you’re going to find this stuff and produce it likely in places like Malawi or Brazil that you may or may not be happy about. You know, I’ve kicked around bad jurisdictions my whole life, and they bother me less so if you have the psychological stability and the patience to be in a name for five years, be in a name for five years, that may decline 30 or 40 or 50% before it goes up tenfold. Rare earths of the spot for you, if you’re not, avoid this stuff like a plague. For me, Trey, my fondness dream is to buy what is potentially a tier one deposit, and I don’t care about the commodity, a deposit with 20 billion or $25 billion in in situ, recoverable reserves and resources, where that deposit. Would be in the lowest cost quartile its industry worldwide, and where the where the deposit would be in the top quartile worldwide, return on capital employed in a commodity that’s out of favor. And I have that rare earth that’s attractive to me. Are
Trey Reik 25:15
there lots of companies that you feel are attractive and legitimate enough for investment. It’s a fairly limited group. It’s
Rick Rule 25:25
tiny. There are 40 or 50 rare earths. I was going to say contenders, perhaps I should say pretenders. There are three that I understand well enough that I can own. It’s likely because I don’t spend all of my life studying rare earth stocks that I’ve missed a couple. It’s also likely that of the three I identified, I’ll stub my toe on at least one. As you know, in exploration development, that’s the game.
Trey Reik 25:52
Are you comfortable mentioning the three?
Rick Rule 25:56
One of them I’m still in the process of acquiring, so I’m going to shut up there. Okay? One is a Sprott client, an SCP client called meteoric. I’m a large shareholder. They need money. They’re going to have to finance. If the terms and conditions are proper, I’ll be a larger shareholder. A different one is a Clara,
Trey Reik 26:13
meteoric trades at what per share pretty low, right? Something like that. Haven’t looked for the last
Rick Rule 26:19
couple days. There are there exhibitors here, and I understand here, and I understand the stock is up by 15% as a consequence of buyers at this conference. Wow. I suspect that Dell, I suspect that that will be mitigated in the very short term. Bio financing,
Trey Reik 26:35
funny how the world works. Yes, sir. All right. So we’ve talked about metals. I thought we might end with your favorite shirt, which is, you know, the battle Bank, which seems to have a captured a good part of your attention and imagination and support. So tell us about battle bank,
Rick Rule 26:56
a trade by nature, as you know, but your audience doesn’t unused money. Salesman, that’s really what I am. I’m I’m a lender by instinct. That’s how I invest. And I’ve been involved in banking now. Formally, for 40 years, I’ve been part of seven banks. The last bank that we did was something called ever Bank, which was created on my living room floor. Trotter, Frank Trotter. We grew that bank from zero in the year 2000 to 28 billion in AUM, 2014 when we sold the bank, the people, we sold the bank to good people, but they had a different product focus, and they abandoned 275,000 customers that we collected
Trey Reik 27:36
wasn’t one of the biggest things For ever bank the ability to own different currencies or might or might. Yes,
Rick Rule 27:44
so let’s move forward. We’re doing it because our model worked once before, we put together a great group of employees, some of whom have left every bank and come to work for us. What are we doing that’s different? Well, one thing we did before is we had, rather than having 15 or 16 deposit products, many of which paid you no interest. We have one money market account. Write Checks if you want to, and we pay interest if you’re interested in interest, which most people are, come to us. There’s a trillion dollars on deposit in the US that doesn’t pay interest. What are they thinking? So that’s our first competitive advantage. We treat people fairly. We pay them interest. We don’t confuse them. One deposit, you can bank in 20 currencies at Battle bank if you want a federally insured deposit in Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, euros, pounds, renminbi, yen, your choice. We have a CD for you for first generation business people in particular, say a young woman from Hong Kong who has a textile business in Hong Kong in the United States, she can bank in Hong Kong dollars. She can bank in US dollars, because she lives in both currencies, and she can transact currency exchange between those two counts accounts for 50 basis points, while Hong Kong Shanghai bank would charge her 200 basis points. The second thing that we do that’s different, and I thought this was illegal. They had to prove to me that I wouldn’t go to jail for offering this product. Is it battle bank. Your IRA is your IRA. Most IRAs are receptacles for Wall Street products, annuities, mutual funds are
Trey Reik 29:11
on the list
Rick Rule 29:13
for us. Your IRA buys an LLC, and that LLC can invest in any permissible business. You could buy a duplex or triplex, which you operate. You could buy a subway or a McDonald’s franchise. You could buy crypto. You could buy gold. The choice is yours, not mine. You can’t buy your present principal residence that doesn’t work. Owner Occupied real estate doesn’t work, but rental property that you control that works. Your IRA is your IRA, and we’ve hired the team that invented that business.
Trey Reik 29:43
So the reason the IRAs are able to do that is the LLC component. Exactly
Rick Rule 29:48
correct. The Ira owns the LLC. The LLC can participate in any legitimate enterprise. Probably wouldn’t want to do a marijuana dispensary, something else, the final product that will be really event. Interest too, is the fact that, unlike any other commercial bank in United States, we’ll do retail lending against physical gold and silver bullion. It needs to be stored at Brinks or Loomis. The reason for that is because I want your bullion stored in a vault owned by a public company so I can make sure of the solvency of your vault, your gold and silver and my collateral needs to be subjected to modern audit principles in a vault that’s owned by a publicly traded company.
Trey Reik 30:27
And in terms of gold that could be held in the IRA or in that account, you have two custodians who you will trust their paperwork. Is that the way it goes in terms of being, you know, a guarantor of the custody.
Rick Rule 30:42
It’s easy enough for us. In the decade of the 70s, a lot of people didn’t trust the government, so they sent their gold to storage in vaults for people that they didn’t know, and the gold went to gold heaven and went away. I want my gold and your gold, my collateral, your gold, to be stored at a place that has a publicly audited financial statement. And I also want them to use best practices like we used at Sprott in terms of the physical audit
Trey Reik 31:10
and what, what spread do they charge you for that?
Rick Rule 31:15
You mean for the storage if, as an example, the dealer, the broker on the Gold is gold, silver.com, whatever you are paying them for storage fee, you will continue to pay them, I see,
Trey Reik 31:32
and they just send you the proof.
Rick Rule 31:34
That’s correct. That’s correct. The gold stays in your possession. But we have a UCC filing. Gotcha. Well,
Trey Reik 31:42
that’s a great update on Battle bank. So as a final question, in terms of this conference and and looking you know forward, what, what again, is the message that you’re most impressed about with this year’s crowd.
Rick Rule 31:58
This crowd is the most sophisticated crowd we’ve ever had. This crowd, about 50% of them are students of the rural classroom, which means they’ve completed six and a half hours in course programming, Introduction to natural resources, where we teach them securities analysis. Many of them have consumed up to 100 hours in other forms of instructional programming. There. This crowd is an unusually interested crowd. I think also it’s an unusually emboldened crowd. They came into the space two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, when nobody was here. Several people have said that anybody who came to the conference last year and didn’t make a lot of money should quit. So, you know, we have, I would say, an unusually educated but also unusually confident
Trey Reik 32:49
crowd. Interesting. Do you think that’s a good sign or a warning sign? Some of both.
Rick Rule 32:55
I was, you heard I tried to be cautious. I when I talked about a global market. I talked about why. I talked about the arithmetic of the American debt. I wasn’t up there as a cheerleader for gold. I was trying to say if this happened, this happened, this happened. And in particular, if this happened, this was going to be the result. We have asked people to consider what would cause them to sell the gold. And I caused and I told him what would cause me to sell the gold. We have also attempted to talk to people about other investment opportunities, natural resources, including, as an example, oil and gas, which is decidedly out of favor. And I guess because people are comfortable with the amount of money that we’ve made them in the gold trade in the last couple of years, people are listening well,
Trey Reik 33:42
are you? Are you? Do you have a lot of activity in oil and gas? I never I do. That’s the remember hearing you talk about it much the business
Rick Rule 33:51
I grew up in, I came to know enough soft rock geology in the 70s, sedimentary geology that the miners couldn’t lie to me, and a financial guy who couldn’t be lied to the miners was fairly rare. I’m actually more conversant in oil and gas, but I’m more competitive in mining because the bar is lower. Interesting.
Trey Reik 34:10
All right. Well, on that note, Rick, thanks for having us. We really enjoy it. You’re a great host. We really appreciate everything you do for all of us, and we’ll check in soon. I
Rick Rule 34:19
look forward to that, Trey. And thank you for your new association with wealthion. I’m excited about you in this role. I think you’ll do a great job. You’ve been in our business for a very long time, which is what’s required.
Trey Reik 34:32
Terrific. Well, thanks for the kind words. See you soon. Great. If
Maggie Lake 34:37
you have any questions about how to navigate the current environment, wealthion can help connect you with a vetted advisor to get a free portfolio review, just click the link in the description below or head to wealthion.com/free there’s no obligation, and it will just take a few minutes of your time again. That’s wealthion.com/free thanks so much for joining us. We’ll see you again next time.
