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.
“I’m taking very big risks because the market is currently in love with developers rather than explorers,” Rule said with the calm certainty of someone who has watched this movie before. “So I’m getting in front of where I think the money will be two years from now.”
It’s classic Rule: buy what is hated, sell what is loved, and never forget that real discovery upside only exists before the market falls in love with a story. The fact that he recovered all of his original capital in the junior mining space this year by selling just twenty-five percent of his holdings only sweetens the bet. The remaining seventy-five percent is now pure optionality, house money riding on the next generation of tier-one discoveries.
His long-term conviction remains rock solid. Rule expects the U.S. dollar to lose roughly seventy-five percent of its purchasing power over the coming decade, which mathematically implies a threefold to fourfold increase in the nominal Gold Price simply to preserve real value. Add thirty years of systemic under-investment in copper, oil and nickel supply, and he believes today’s commodity prices will look “fictional” five years from now.
Yet even inside that bullish macro canvas, exploration is where his eyes light up. While he admits the uranium junior space is “fully priced, if not overpriced” after its spectacular run, and while he remains constructive on large gold producers trading at absurd discounts to a $4,200 Gold Price (Wall Street is apparently still modelling $3,200), it is the unloved exploration frontier that has him allocating aggressively with new money.
Rick Rule has always loved hate, and right now the purest expression of hate in the resource world is the early-stage explorer that hasn’t yet delivered a headline-grabbing drill hole. That’s exactly where he wants to be.
As he wrapped up the interview with a mischievous grin, he left the audience with the line that has defined his half-century career: “The easiest way to make money in junior resource stocks is to find a sector that is universally despised. I love hate. It has served me extremely well.”
In a world chasing yesterday’s winners, Rick Rule is already positioned for the discoveries of tomorrow, because legends don’t follow the herd; they hunt where the herd is afraid to graze.