Nick Hodge,
Publisher
July 18, 2025
I spent last week at the Rule Symposium in Boca Raton, where Digest Publishing was a media sponsor.
According to the website, it’s where you can “discover the key to navigating the lucrative world of resource investing.”
As one of the speakers, I guess that makes me a locksmith.
But truth be told, there is no single key to resource investing.
There are approaches. Steve Todoruk at Sprott likes to buy new deposits after the euphoria of the discovery hole wears off. Lobo Tiggre often discusses the re-rate of companies moving from construction into production.
There are cycles. We’ve all seen the Lassonde curve and heard about previous cycles in gold, uranium and rare earths.
There are “experts.” I’m not sure I’m that, yet I find myself on the dais year after year. And there are dozens of others on Twitter, Substack, YouTube, and at the Rule Symposium itself. If going this route, I find it’s best to approach it like looking up a new recipe online: read a few of them and take the best attributes from each.
The closest thing I’ve found to a key is showing up and doing the work.
If you showed up to the Dundee Corporation (TSX: DC.A)(OTC: DDEJF) lunch, where I introduced President and CEO Jonathan Goodman, you would’ve heard him discuss rules of thumb for evaluating a new deposit on a first pass. They include:
The ratio of a grade of a deposit relative to its cutoff grade. He wants to see 3:1 at a minimum. That is, if a resource is calculated at 0.3 gram per tonne cutoff grade, the resource needs to have an overall grade of at least 0.9 grams per tonne. Reason: the cutoff grade approximates costs, and they are nearly always underestimated.
When you’re looking at an underground operation. The rule is you can typically process 40% to 50% of your vertical feet in terms of tonnes per today. So if your deposit is 1,000 vertical feet, you can process 400-500 tonnes per day in your mill. Example: If you’re expecting to feed a 2,000 tonne per day mill at the project… you’re going to bankrupt.
If you came to the Revival Gold (TSX-V: RVG)(OTC: RVLGF) breakfast, where I introduced President and CEO Hugh Agro, you would’ve heard him discuss how the company has 6.1 million ounces across two past-producing projects in the safe jurisdiction of the American West, and why companies like Dundee were lining up to provide capital to support their development.
(Full Disclosure: I have participated in private placements with Revival Gold and offered them to Private Placement Intel. I currently cover it in Hodge Family Office. Shares are up ~150% since February.)
And if you walked the exhibit hall, you could’ve met companies like Bravo Mining (TSX-V: BRVO)(OTC: BRVMF), which is developing a globally significant PGM+gold+nickel deposit at a time when gold is near record high prices and platinum and palladium are moving violently higher. The company released a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on the first day of the conference with a ‘base case’ that carried an after-tax net present value (NPV) of $1.25 billion, a 50% internal rate of return (IRR), and a sub-2.5 year payback.
(Full Disclosure: We participated in Bravo’s IPO along with Rick Rule at C$0.64. Shares now trade at C$3.45.)
Can you do all that? Did you do all that?
Even if you can and did, finding success in this space can be a challenge. It is high-risk and opaque. By the time a project is advanced enough to have metrics tied to it, those who show up every day already know about it.
And that’s why so many resource investors fall back on the aforementioned “experts.”
As Rick himself often advises, you need to be able to spend an hour per month on each stock you own.
But as the moderator on many panels I’ve sat on, I’ve heard him say that most investors don’t want to be taught how to fish, they’d rather have the fish caught and fileted for them, and served with the appropriate accoutrement.
And as any seafood connoisseur will tell you, it’s important to have a good fishmonger. Or as we call them in today’s world of internet stock research: an influencer.
I sat on the Influencer Panel at the Symposium along with Daniela Cambone, Jay Martin, Paul Harris, and Adam Taggart. It was moderated by Rick Rule, and he essentially asked us how we select good fishmongers. You can see all our answers in the video here:
And if you want me to deliver you fish every week, I do that with my partner Gerardo Del Real in our premium podcast, Investing in Bizarro World Live. We cover the market every week and discuss recommendations that are in each of our letters and portfolios.
Happy fishing.
Call it like you see it,
Nick Hodge
Publisher, Daily Profit Cycle