Rick Rule’s Rule #1 for 2026: Buy Exploration While Everyone Else Chases Producers

After one of the strongest years ever for natural resource stocks, most investors are content to ride the producers and developers that delivered monster gains in 2025.

Not Rick Rule.

The 50-year veteran just sold 25% of his junior portfolio, recovering every dollar he ever put in, and immediately rotated fresh capital into the most unloved corner of the market: high-risk, high-reward exploration.

His message is clear: the easiest 10x opportunities still live where nobody else is looking.

Love winners all you want; Rick Rule still loves hate.

Pentagon to China-Dependent Battery Suppliers: You’re Done in 388 Days

The FY26 NDAA conference report is out, and Section 842 is the paragraph every defense energy buyer has been dreading, or celebrating.

In exactly 388 days, the DoD is prohibited from buying any advanced battery whose critical minerals, cathodes, anodes, or cells ever touched a “covered foreign entity.”

Translation: if China is anywhere in your supply chain, you’re off the approved source list. No waivers worth counting on. No grandfather clauses.

This is bigger than last year’s six-company blacklist. This is the entire upstream stack.

The money is real, $2.5 B+ a year and growing fast, and it’s about to flow only to companies that can prove, with forensic-level documentation, that their lithium, graphite, cobalt, and nickel sulfate never saw a Chinese refinery.

If you’re at a prime, a Tier-1, or an investor in this space, your 2026 calendar just filled up.

Gold and Silver Crush the S&P 500 and Copper in Historic Two-Year Rout

Two years ago, if you told most portfolio managers that gold would outperform the S&P 500 by more than 2× and silver by more than 3×, they would have laughed.

Fast-forward to December 2025:

• Gold: +103% ($2,063 → $4,187)

• Silver: +144% ($23.80 → $58.03)

• S&P 500 (total return): +44%

• Copper: +38%

The drivers weren’t a mystery, record central-bank buying, 150 bps of Fed cuts, sticky inflation, and a 250-million-ounce structural silver deficit from solar + EVs. Yet the majority of allocations still treat precious metals as an afterthought.

Sometimes the best trades are the ones hiding in plain sight for decades. This was one of them.

Tom Lee’s Christmas List: Just One Thing... More Ethereum

While most of us are finalizing holiday shopping lists, Tom Lee and the team at BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR) just checked off the ultimate Christmas present: 138,452 ETH, beautifully wrapped at ~$435 million.

That single week’s haul, the largest in months, brings BitMine’s Ethereum treasury to over 3.2% of the entire circulating supply, with total digital assets and cash now topping $13.2 billion.

Call it an early gift to shareholders or the boldest vote of confidence in the “Crypto Supercycle” thesis yet, but when Fundstrat’s Tom Lee is stuffing the corporate stocking with half a billion dollars of Ethereum while the rest of the market debates coal vs. candles, it’s worth paying attention.

The Fusaka upgrade is live, the Fed is about to play Santa with another rate cut, and tokenization trends (hello, BlackRock and JPMorgan on-chain experiments) keep accelerating. Looks like someone at BitMine has been very, very good this year, and they’re rewarding themselves accordingly.

Here’s to a bullish 2026 under the tree. Who else has crypto on their holiday wish list?

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