I’m reluctant to quote Rick Rule considering everything thats happened, but I do think this quote of his adds perspective to the discussion:
"Rick: My experience has been…my reputation, first of all, was built on the more speculative end of the market. That isn’t to suggest that I’m not an investor too, but I’m known as a speculator. In fact, all the money that I now invest, I made speculating. And, in speculation, that is the search for 10-baggers or 20-baggers, what I’ve learned since 1998, which is when I started really keeping track of my performance, was that the average length of time for a 10-bagger was almost 5 years. It was 50 months. Most investors’ time frames are two weeks, or three weeks, or a quarter, or something like that. You make money in exploration by answering unanswered questions. And to make a lot of money, you have to answer a series of unanswered questions. If you assume, as I do, that each individual unanswered question takes between 12 and 18 months, if you buy an exploration stock without the expectation of holding it for 18 months, you’re lying to yourself. You’re setting yourself up to fail. The other part of that that’s important is remembering that prices are ephemeral. I was talking to Ross Beaty on the last panel and I’ve participated in all of Ross Beaty’s successes. And I can tell you that I have never been involved in a Ross Beaty 10-bagger where the price of the stock didn’t fall 50% twice during the time that I owned the stock. So, the first lesson is that investors’ time expectations are wrong. They’re way, way, way, way, way too short. And the second thing is that investors, in the context of time, waste way too much time with the share price."
(20min delay)
