Rick Rule on Copper, Uranium, and Rare Earths: Why the Next Decade Could Define Commodity Investing

Few voices carry as much weight in the natural resources investment world as Rick Rule. A veteran investor with decades of experience in commodity markets, Rule has built a reputation for calling major market shifts before the mainstream catches on, and for being refreshingly blunt about what he sees. In a recent interview, he shared his outlook on three critical commodities: rare earths, uranium, and copper. His insights aren’t just relevant for seasoned investors, they’re essential reading for anyone trying to understand where global resources markets are heading over the next ten years.

Rare Earths: High Risk, High Reward, and Not Actually That Rare

Rule opened his commentary on rare earths with an admission that’s both candid and instructive. Despite spending five years trying to deepen his knowledge of the sector, his primary takeaway has been how much he still doesn’t know. That kind of intellectual honesty from someone of his experience level is itself telling, rare earths are genuinely complicated.

The first thing he wants investors to understand is the naming convention. Rare earths aren’t actually rare in terms of geological abundance. The more accurate explanation is that we simply haven’t explored for them seriously, primarily because there was no economic incentive to do so. For years, Chinese producers were so efficient at extracting and processing rare earths that prices were kept suppressed, making exploration elsewhere economically unviable.

That dynamic is now changing, and for two distinct reasons.

The first is geopolitical. China has increasingly weaponized its dominance in rare earth supply chains, using export controls and restrictions as leverage in broader trade disputes, a move some analysts view as a direct response to Western nations’ use of financial tools like dollar-based sanctions. The rare earths sector has become a front line in the larger contest over critical mineral supply chains.

The second driver is less widely discussed but arguably more consequential: environmental pressure within China itself. The extraction of rare earths has historically caused significant environmental destruction, and both Chinese citizens and the Chinese government are becoming less willing to tolerate those consequences. As environmental standards tighten and compliance costs rise, the cost of producing rare earths inside China has increased by approximately 30 percent over just 18 months. That cost increase effectively sets a new floor price for global rare earth markets, regardless of whatever geopolitical noise surrounds the sector.

Rule is direct about the investment landscape: of the 80 to 90 companies currently positioning themselves as rare earth developers outside China, the vast majority will never build a producing mine. Most of these deposits are undeveloped and, in his assessment, will remain undeveloped for the foreseeable future. He estimates that only four or five will ultimately be developed, likely with some form of U.S. government support, something he finds uncomfortable as a taxpayer, though he acknowledges it may benefit shareholders.

His own rare earth holdings are concentrated in Brazil-based developers, which he describes as very high-quality deposits by any technical measure. But he’s upfront about the risks: Brazil carries its own set of political and infrastructure challenges that investors need to understand and accept before committing capital.

His bottom line on rare earths is clear. This is a sector for speculators with a three-to-five-year time horizon, a genuine tolerance for losing 50 percent of their investment if things go wrong, and the patience to potentially see 1,000 to 2,000 percent returns if things go right. For investors who don’t match that profile precisely, Rule suggests avoiding the sector entirely.

Uranium: The Term Market Is Finally Telling the Truth

Rick Rule has been a uranium bull for a long time, though he’s been careful not to let conviction override discipline. He sold uranium stocks when he believed they had become overheated, including roughly a year before this interview. That kind of cycle awareness matters when assessing what he’s saying now, he’s not a perma-bull cheerleader, he’s an analyst who happens to hold a bullish long-term view.

What Rule finds genuinely significant at this moment is how the supply deficit in uranium is finally beginning to register in the long-term contract market. Term prices now stand at approximately $90 per pound, and the term market is gaining meaningful participation from both producers and utilities.

This structural feature of uranium is something Rule regards as unique among all commodities he follows. Uranium is, in his words, the only commodity in the world where producers and consumers can enter into long-term contracts that specify both price and delivery terms in ways that genuinely benefit both parties. For a uranium producer, a long-term offtake agreement from an investment-grade utility creates something extremely valuable: predictable cash flows that can support project financing.

Rule’s point here is subtle but important. When a producer can show a bank or credit analyst a multi-year purchase commitment from an investment-grade counterparty, the cost of capital drops significantly. This changes the fundamental economics of uranium project development in a way that most junior mining sectors never achieve.

His preferred vehicle for uranium exposure is Cameco, the Canadian mining giant and one of the world’s largest primary uranium producers. This represents a shift from his historical preference for junior developers, which he pursued because of informational advantages available to sophisticated investors. He acknowledges that information access has become more democratized, and in the current environment, the risk-to-reward calculation continues to favor Cameco over the juniors.

That said, he recognizes that risk-tolerant speculators can reasonably look at development-stage companies like Denison Mines, Paladin Energy, and NexGen Energy. The improving term market and declining cost of capital make these companies more fundable than they were even a year ago, which is a meaningful development for companies that have been waiting for financing conditions to improve.

Copper: The Clearest Investment Case of the Three

When Rule calls something a no-brainer, it’s worth stopping to listen carefully, because he doesn’t use that word casually. On copper, he uses it without hesitation.

The popular narrative around copper demand tends to focus on data centers and electric vehicles, both legitimate demand drivers, but both reflecting a distinctly Western perspective. Rule argues this framing is incomplete and misses the larger structural story. There are currently approximately one billion people on Earth with no access to primary electricity. Bringing those people onto the grid over the coming decades will require massive amounts of copper, to generate the power, to transmit it, to wire the homes and buildings, and to make electricity practically useful once it arrives.

This isn’t a speculative scenario. It is the stated objective of development institutions, national governments, and international energy organizations worldwide. When you layer this electrification-of-the-unconnected story on top of the EV transition, data center buildout, and general infrastructure demand in the developed world, the demand picture for copper becomes almost overwhelming.

The supply side of the equation is where Rule gets particularly emphatic. For approximately 30 years, the mining industry has systematically underinvested in copper, underinvested in exploration, in development, and in the construction of new mines. The consequences of that neglect are now baked into the system in ways that can’t be quickly corrected. Rule cites a Wood Mackenzie study presented at a mining conference in London suggesting that major copper producers worldwide will need to spend $250 billion over the next decade just to maintain current production levels. Levels that are already in deficit relative to current demand, which itself continues to grow at roughly 2.5 percent compounded annually.

He is direct on this point: the gap between copper supply and copper demand cannot be bridged in any realistic near-term scenario. The math simply doesn’t work.

Compounding the supply problem is what Rule calls the “social take”, the cumulative burden of government fees, taxes, royalties, and off-concession expenditures that mining operations face worldwide. These costs are rising steadily across most major mining jurisdictions. Permitting timelines, despite political rhetoric about deregulation, have not shortened in any meaningful way.

He offers a striking example. The Resolution copper deposit in Arizona, a billion-ton deposit grading 1.5 percent copper, situated in a location with existing road, rail, power, and water access, adjacent to a community with an established mining workforce, has been stuck in the permitting process for 28 years. In a global industry where the average mine grade is around 0.5 percent copper, Resolution represents a three-times-average-grade deposit in arguably one of the most infrastructure-advantaged locations imaginable. And it still cannot get permitted.

His conclusion from all of this is that the copper price must go up. Not might, but must. He makes a further point that often gets overlooked in commodity analysis: copper’s utility to end users is so disproportionately high relative to its price that demand is essentially inelastic to copper price increases at the margin. He uses the example of an electric vehicle containing 300 to 400 pounds of copper. If that vehicle sells for $70,000 to $80,000, the copper content at current prices represents roughly $1,500. If the copper price doubled, the impact on the vehicle’s production cost would be marginal, and therefore, it wouldn’t meaningfully suppress demand.

Something that has to go up, and can go up, will go up. That’s the core of Rule’s copper thesis, stated as simply as he can put it.

What Investors Should Take Away

Rick Rule’s commentary on these three commodities reflects a consistent analytical framework: understand supply constraints deeply, respect demand fundamentals, be honest about geopolitical risk, and don’t confuse an interesting story with an investable opportunity.

Rare earths offer high potential but require genuine risk tolerance and sector-specific knowledge that most retail investors don’t possess. Uranium is in a structural transition that is only now being properly reflected in financing markets, with Cameco representing his preferred risk-adjusted exposure. And copper, despite being the least glamorous of the three, may represent the most straightforward commodity investment case of the decade, driven by irreversible demand trends meeting a supply base that took 30 years of neglect to create and cannot be rebuilt quickly.

These are long-cycle theses, not trading ideas. But for investors with patience, conviction, and a clear understanding of the risks involved, Rule’s framework for thinking about these markets offers a genuinely useful roadmap for the decade ahead.