Rick Rule - I Remember My First Period of Catastrophic Losses

Another Rick Rule Sprott interview (and transcript) with Tekoa Da Silva

•  I’m embarrassed to say this, there was so much money to be made in the sector when the oil price ran from $3 a barrel to $30¹ a barrel and where the gold price ran from $35 an ounce to $850 an ounce that I made the young man’s mistake of equating a bull-market with brains........The truth is that the decade of the 1970’s was extraordinarily good to me. I was a young man that worked very hard but I was in the right place at the right time. Commodities were on the ascent and I was in the commodities business. As a consequence of never being hurt before, I was extremely aggressive and the fact that I was extremely aggressive made me a very good salesman. I confused the bull market with brains and I was able to convince others to do the same. I also drank the Kool-Aid myself. One of the things that happens is that bull markets, like bear markets, are self-fulfilling prophecies and the whole narrative in the 1970’s was that the 1970’s was going to go on further which was a very convenient paradigm for me to assume.

• There’s a truism in exploration that says you make money employing old technology in new places or new technology in old places, but you don’t make money applying old technology in old places because that assumes that you are smarter than all your predecessors, which is highly unlikely.
• As I have said many times before, bear markets are the authors of bull markets and we are in an epic bear market with the TSX-V (the Toronto Venture Exchange where many mineral exploration companies trade) off 83 percent.⁴ If somebody thinks that I am going to cash out in 2015 -- in other words my epitaph is ‘the contrarian who sold out at the bottom,’ they got another thing coming.