I found this presentation by Rick Rule struck a number of chords with me. He believes we are currently in a gold bull market.

I felt many of his insights were applicable to investing in mining companies, but companies more generally - Worth watching.

He espouses the idea that identifying and investing in quality individual stocks is the way to go.

He refers to Pareto's rule or the 80/20 rule and loosely applies it to the mining sector:

"In a subject as big as mining, 1% of the population base generates 40% of the utility in junior mining"

"The mining industry as a whole is valueless. Only about 10%of the issues are worth owning"

"You're Only Ever a Contrarian or a Victim"

All ideas that would not be foreign to @Bear77 whose work in this arena is without parallel around here.

Deutsche Goldmesse - Day 2- November 15, 2025- We were honoured to have Rick Rule, founder and CEO of Rule Investment Media, close out this year’s Deutsche Goldmesse. The legendary investor joined us to discuss the gold bull market and his framework for evaluating opportunities across the mining sector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7kaGRBBr2o

Sunday 30th November 2025:

I suggested here in recent weeks that I thought A$6,000/oz and US$4,000/oz might become new downside resistance levels from which the gold price would eventually take off again and resume its north-easterly trajectory. So far, so good.

The circa 9% "correction" to the gold price that we saw in October has been mostly made up for by the November rise, as shown above on those 1 Year Price Charts.

This is reflected by the GMD share price in their 3 month graph below:

And if we look at the two largest Australian gold companies, NST & EVN, they have both overtaken their previous highs that they set before the "correction" and are now making new all-time highs:

In NST's case their new all-time high of $27.92 was made during Thursday's trading (27th Nov) and with EVN their new $12.05 all-time high was reached during Friday (28th Nov) before they closed at $11.88.

And there was plenty of bullishness (positive sentiment) across the gold sector on Friday:

Here's my current Australian Gold Sector Watchlist showing Friday's trading and closing prices - from best performer on the day to worst:

I've highlighted the 4 physical gold (bullion) ETFs/ETPs in the orange/gold rectangles (above). The fact that they are near the bottom of the table with small rises and a small drop in the case of QAU (which is the only one that is currency hedged) shows how positive the sentiment was across the majority of the sector on Friday with most goldies rising a lot more than the gold price which rose a little.

WAF's finally back trading again after their 3-month suspension - I wrote a forum post about that here (today).

Mindax (MDX, near the bottom of that table above) is interesting in that it is the ONLY company in that list with zero bids ("Buyers") after the CSPA (closing single price auction) on Friday afternoon:

So clearly not ALL goldies are going to the moon. However, it should be noted that despite Mindax still owning their Mt Lucky Gold Project which lies within the Mt Margaret Mineral Field of the north-eastern Goldfields of WA (Laverton Greenstone Belt), approximately 7 km east of the producing Granny Smith gold mine (which is owned by Gold Fields Ltd, the recent acquirers of GOR - Gold Road Resources), Mindax is clearly prioritising their iron ore projects and assets at this point, so I should probably drop them off this list.

Interesting results at their recent AGM - This will obviously have happened before however I don't remember ever seeing this before myself - every one of their resolutions was passed with 100% of votes cast, with zero % of votes against - see here: MDX-Results-of-Meeting.PDF

They've either got some very happy shareholders, or... more likely they have a very tight register with bugger all retail investors who bother to vote.

They have 2,348,672,868 (2.35 billion or 2,349 million) shares on issue, and their three company Directors have some skin in the game:

Not too much in the way of "Subs":

Anyway, there's likely something going on there behind the scenes that might be uncovered with some digging, but I've got better things to do.

I do not hold MDX and aren't interested in owning them, but below is an overview of my current gold sector exposures:

Note: There may appear to be minor errors due to rounding but the spreadsheet itself (that this screenshot was taken from) has numbers that go to many more decimal places than those numbers shown above.

Column B shows each company's current share price (Friday's closing price), column C shows my weighted average cost per share, column D shows my current percentage gain or loss based on the difference between columns B & C, columns E and F both show my current weighting to that company as a percentage of the total value of all of my holdings in my three largest real money portfolios, and column G shows which portfolio each company is held in (of those three portfolios).

The difference between column E and column F is that column E is based on my total cost base, i.e. all the money I have invested in all of those companies, so it shows the percentage of my total cost base that I have invested in each company, whereas column F is instead based on the total of the current market value of all positions, so based on the total market value of all three portfolios combined based on Friday's closing share prices rather than what I paid for those shares.

This difference is clear if you look at a company like GMD where the share price is more than 300% higher than my average price paid for those shares, so it's a 1.51% position based on my cost base, but a 5.02% position based on the current market value.

It's less clear with the two Engineering and Construction (E&C) companies at the bottom where despite both share prices being higher than my average price paid for those shares, the market value % weighting (column F) is lower than the cost base % weighting (column E) which might seem odd, however it's because those positions have risen less in percentage terms than my overall gain across all portfolios based on current market prices, so the big winners like GMD, NST, EVN and MEK mean that in percentage terms LYL and GNG are underperformers in relative terms despite being worth more than what I paid for them, or to put it another way, LYL and GNG have performed OK, but not as well as many of my other positions - so far.

Hope that makes sense - I should also point out that my SMSF and Speccy portfolios contain other companies that are not listed above because those companies not listed above are not gold sector companies or E&C contractors who service the gold sector (like LYL and GNG) and this post is about the gold sector. So the numbers in columns E & F are based on the grand total of all of my real money share market positions, not just the ones listed in this post. So they are my true weightings based on either my total cost base (column E) or current market values (column F) of all of my real money positions in all three portfolios (PFs).

Most of the Producers are also actively exploring and developing other projects in addition to their producing mines, however in the case of VAU and EVN I am invested in them purely on the basis of their current producing assets so I have just listed them as "Producers".

All of the Developers are also Explorers, as they are all actively drilling or have planned drilling campaigns, and most of them are drilling at more than one project at the same time, however all of them do have at least one advanced project that they believe hosts enough gold to one day become a producing mine. It doesn't mean they are right, but it's what they are saying. I'm not going to stay invested in all of those developers until they become producers. In fact the Lassonde Curve suggests that during the FS stage a lot of these project developer companies should be expected to often have a falling share price in the absence of an external share price driver such as a rising gold price or positive M&A activity. So I'm in the explorers and developers for a good time, not necessarily a long time. I can and will sell or trim without notice. My view is that there is money moving up the risk curve (and down the quality curve) into the smaller end of the market now, due to the larger gold producers looking fully priced to some market participants.

None of this is advice, just what I'm doing at this point in time.

During the past week I have trimmed RMS, although they are still my second largest gold producer position, and added Vault Minerals (VAU) to my SMSF (I explained why here), and I have trimmed 4 of my Speccy positions to lock in some profits. I have also increased my LYL position by around +11% on Friday, taking advantage of the pullback below $13 (I topped up at $12.68). The Speccy PF trims funded the LYL top-up. So I'm fairly active with these portfolios, and they can change a fair bit from week to week.

BTW, the above table was done today, using Friday's closing prices, and reflects all of those trades that I just mentioned - so it's current as of today.

But my point is that I reckon the gold bull run is still intact, and I'm still on that ride.

21st November 2025: Gold has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride lately, and gold companies even more so than the gold price. We ended this week with a gold price that was a little down, but a gold sector that was smashed down. The vast majority of these companies - in my watchlist below - are still well up for the year but they mostly fell a lot more than the gold price today:

My Aussie Gold Sector Watchlist today (21-Nov-2025):

I realised after I finished that lot that I need to add a few more names to that watchlist, including three companies that I hold in my Speccy Portfolio, Sunshine Metals (SHN, 0.9% weighting), Kalgoorlie Gold Mining a.k.a. Kal Gold (KAL, 1.1% weighting) and Red Hill Minerals (RHI, 1.5% weighting) who own some iron ore and gold royalties and are also gold and base metals explorers including at their West Pilbara Gold & Base Metal Project where they are finding some decent gold plus some copper. RHI was down -1.04% today, KAL was down -1.75% and SHN didn't trade because they were in a trading suspension pending an application to the Supreme Court of Western Australia seeking orders in relation to the company’s inadvertent failure to lodge a cleansing notice under section 708A(5)(e) of the Corporations Act in relation to the issue of 3,972,584 shares on 7 October 2025 - which broke ASIC regulations and ASX Trading rules - SHN announced after the market closed this evening that the Court did grant the orders this afternoon that the company was seeking so they'll be trading again on Monday morning. Not a bad day to be in a trading halt or suspension.

I do see this sort of thing a fair bit at the smaller end of the market where the company secretary is often also the CFO or else is a company secretary for a number of different companies and the reporting procedures do occasionally fail to work as planned. It shouldn't happen, but it does, and they then have to spend money to get Supreme Court orders to get themselves reinstated after being suspended from trading for breaking the rules. It can happen when options are exercised or when performance shares (STI or LTI shares) are issued and the paperwork doesn't get to the right people in time for the right documents to get lodged with the ASX within the required 5 day period. It annoys shareholders for two reasons - because the shares get suspended for a day or two (not a bad thing today of course) and also because the company has wasted shareholder's money on legal and court fees that they didn't need to pay if they hadn't stuffed up in the first place. It's annoying, but not fatal.

I have now added those 3 companies to my Aussie Gold Sector Watchlist (after creating those edited screenshots above) along with Aureka (AKA) which was part of the RAAS Research Group Stock Take Webinar: The Gold Sector presentation that @BkrDzn was part of on Nov 19th (last Wednesday, see here) - where HRZ and STN were also covered). AKA was actually up +3.33%, one of only 4 ASX-listed gold companies in the green today. I hadn't heard of them before watching that webinar recording yesterday. The best of the 4 that rose today was Forrestania Resources (FRS), up +10.42%; FRS is a company that @BkrDzn mentioned here recently might be worth keeping an eye on now that they've bought the Lake Johnston gold mill from HRZ, as announced earlier this week - see here: Acquisition of Lake Johnston & $34m Placement.PDF. Earlier this year they were trading at less than 1 cent/share, now they're 26.5 cps and they've been as high as 32 cps recently. In percentage terms, that's... a lot!

So my highest 7 gold sector weightings (as shown above in that watchlist) are RMS (7.5%), BC8 (5.5%), CMM (5.4%), NST (5.1%), GMD (5%), EVN (4.4%) and CYL (3.4%).

Outside of the gold sector, and outside of my SMSF, I have larger weightings to my two favourite engineering companies, Lycopodium (LYL) with 12.4% and G.R. Engineering (GNG) with 12.1%.

I did trim a few of my goldies on Thursday (NST, CMM, EVN, FFM) and sold out of CSC (Capstone Copper) entirely to buy back into ARB (3.3%) and TNE (3%) and to top up DBI (now 5.1%) and BC8 (now 5.5%), as I have mentioned elsewhere here. FFM (Firefly Metals) is developing a high-grade copper/gold deposit in Canada but they're mostly a copper play now - the high grades they are finding are high copper grades, not high-grade gold, and I've done well out of FFM - up over 30% in not very long, so I've sold more than half of my FFM shares now (already) to lock in some of that profit. The weightings shown above are based on my holdings today (Friday evening), so all of Thursday's trades have been factored in already.

It was an ocean of red across all sectors but Gold was the worst performing ASX sector today (Friday):

Down -4.81% is a large sector move for sure, however over the past 8 weeks we've seen similar percentage movements with the gold sector, both up and down, on a number of days.

As you can see above on the last page of my Aussie Gold Sector Watchlist, the physical gold bullion ETFs/ETPs (Exchange Traded Funds/Products, in the blue rectangles) were flat to down a little, but most of the sector was down a lot.

Below you can see the last 60 days of gold price movements, followed by the last 5 years, with A$ gold on the left and US$ gold on the right.

Hopefully, you can see from both the 60 day graphs and the 5 year graphs why it looks to me like we've just had a small correction as part of a longer term uptrend that we're still in.

Over the last month the gold price is down less than 1% in A$ and less than 2% in US$, as shown above in the Performance Tables between the two sets of charts.

And gold was only down by around half of one percent overnight so the sector sell-off was more sentiment driven (very negative sentiment towards gold companies today) than due to the underlying gold price movement which was relatively minor. And sentiment tends to turn on a dime, or an "X" tweet, or "Truth Social" post.

It looks to me like the A$ gold price is staying above A$6,000/ounce and while the US$ gold price has dipped back below US$4,000/ounce a couple of times recently, it's bounced back up each time, so it's looking to me like A$6,000 and US$4,000 could be new downside resistance levels for gold in the near-to-mid term. Time will tell. I reckon A$7,000/ounce isn't too far away.

Below is a graph of NST, EVN, GMD, CMM and RMS over the past 3 years, against the ASX200 (XJO). It's clear that those five large Australian gold producers are still well ahead of the ASX200 Index and recent SP falls haven't changed that outperformance. It's also clear that their share prices get back up to new highs after every stumble.

Let's see what next week brings...

Pumping my own tyres on this but we held a gold webinar yesterday which included presos from HRZ, STN and AKA. I own all three and have professional engagements with HRZ and AKA (as I've noted before).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2zuD_tcGDY