Rick Rule’s Rule #1 for 2026: Buy Exploration While Everyone Else Chases Producers
The Mining Legend Who Just Cashed Out His Juniors, and Immediately Went Shopping for the Next Wave of Hated Explorers
There are few voices in global resource investing that carry the weight of Rick Rule. After fifty years of riding commodity cycles, the man behind Rule Investment Media has seen every boom, bust, and false dawn the sector can throw at an investor. So when he sat down with Commodity-TV at the Resourcing Tomorrow conference in London in early December 2025, the room listened.
And what did the living legend have to say after one of the strongest years the resource space has ever enjoyed? Simple: the best bargains are no longer in the rear-view mirror; they’re hiding in the one place almost nobody is looking: high-risk, high-reward exploration.
Yes, you read that right. While most retail and institutional money is still chasing the producers and near-term developers that quadrupled in 2025, Rule has quietly rotated fresh capital back into the “raggedy edge” of frontier exploration. In his own words, one side of his barbell portfolio is loaded with the finest blue-chip names the industry has ever produced, names like Franco-Nevada, Agnico Eagle, Wheaton Precious Metals and, surprisingly, ExxonMobil, but the other side is deliberately stuffed with the kind of early-stage exploration stories that make most fund managers reach for the antacids.

