This article was originally published on June 24, 2025.  You can see in the Teaser Tracking box at the bottom that there’s been one relative winner and two relative losers among the teased MDP stocks so far (though the winner is up about 40% today, not the 1,500% gains Rickards was expecting to come within a year of his pitch), and the ad continues to run, largely unchanged.  What follows has not been updated, but I have added a few minor updates to the Quick Take box above.

This is what’s promised in Jim Rickards’ ad:

“The Pioneer dominates land-based scanning, 4,800% gain potential. The Wildcat controls deep sea detection with 1,520% gain potential. The Innovator provides essential AI technology with 4,340% gain potential.”

OK, I confess that I dragged my feet on this one… it’s almost painful to watch Jim Rickards read off the teleprompter for an hour, and they don’t usually provide transcripts for their Paradigm Press infomercials, and I looked for any excuse to avoid it. But so many readers are asking that I sucked it up today and sat through the whole thing. I even took notes!

So yes, I can tell you who the “secret” stocks are in the “$150 Trillion Birthright” pitch from Jim Rickards. Here’s how the ad begins:

“Jim Rickards Issues Final Warning:

“$150 Trillion Birthright:

“Trump Unlocks Phase II on June 24th

“Across two centuries of American history, there is ONE legendary historical comparison: Investors could’ve made a rare 200X returns in just 3 years”

This “presentation” is an ad for The Situation Report, which is Rickards’ “most advanced” upgrade service, recommending small investments and speculations (and probably options trades, given some of the short-term gains they talk about). That letter will cost you $1,995/yr “on sale”, and, like most of the pricey letters that folks might buy in the heat of the moment and later regret, they offer no refunds (if they don’t recommend something that posts a 500% gain, and you call to complain, they’ll… give you a credit for another Paradigm Press letter).

And what’s the bait to lure your wallet out of your pants? Here’s how they sum it up on the order form:

“The situation is unprecedented:

“President Trump opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals

“Every mining company in America will be legally required to find the exact location of these mineral deposits BEFORE they can dig a single hole

“THREE small companies could dominate this essential, mineral discovery technology with their patents

“Thanks to President Trump, the market for their services could explode from $2 billion to $100 billion over the next 12 months”

The Trump Administration is indeed trying to increase the amount of federal land that is available for lease by oil and gas companies, and (probably a bit more slowly) by other mineral exploration companies. This is not necessarily a land rush moment where all the land is put up for lease today, though, it’s more likely to be a gradual increase as the federal agencies determine new lease territories and schedule auctions, and oil and gas and mining companies consider bidding on those leases.

The federal announcements say that there will be “at least 15” federal oil and gas lease auctions this year for public land, for example, perhaps, says the skeptic, because there were 14 such auctions in 2024 and this new administration wants to make sure the number is higher. The leases during the first two quarters of this year, under President Trump’s new policies and directives, increased the total acreage of BLM-managed lands under lease for oil and gas development by about 1%… mostly because the denominator is HUGE, there are already 23+ million acres of federal land under lease for oil and gas exploration and production, this kind of leasing has been a very big business since 1920 — there are a lot of headlines about formerly protected areas of federal land being opened up for lease, but it takes a lot of acres to make an impact).

Mining is a lot more complicated than oil and gas. Mining land isn’t put up for auction, but most of the land that the BLM owns or manages, which is mostly in western states, is generally open for mineral exploration, and if you find something on a piece of that land where nobody has an active claim, you can put in a mining claim (mostly by identifying “locatable minerals,” mostly metals — the laws covering this kind of prospecting haven’t changed much in 150 years… and unlike oil and gas, miners generally don’t have to pay royalties to the government or lease the land before they can build a mine, though they do need lots of permits). There are restricted areas, so maybe President Trump is opening up some of the national wilderness areas for mining claims, or some of the “wild rivers” areas, I haven’t seen details about that — but it seems misleading to me to imply that on June 24, we’re auctioning off all the federal land to mining companies. There was one Bureau of Land Management auction today that I’m aware of, one of many that have been held this year — it was for an oil and gas parcel in Nevada that had also gone up for auction in each of the past two years, with no bidders.

Maybe there were other auctions scheduled for today that I didn’t notice, and there are many auctions scheduled over the next few years, but certainly 650 million acres of federal land did not get auctioned off for mineral exploration/production today. And yes, the 650 million acres is a rough approximation for how much federal land in the United States is administered by BLM and the National Forest Service and potentially available for mineral exploration, that’s about 25% of the country (most people cite “640 million acres” as the total), and it is true that about 350 million acres have been restricted or withdrawn from that total in the past (167 million acres withdrawn, and 182 million acres “restricted from future development” according to one mining society), so maybe there are inaccessible lands that President Trump wants made accessible for mineral exploration, whether that’s land that is blocked because of cultural, environmental, defense, or some other government or business purpose, I don’t know — a lot of it is National Forest land, I expect, but we’re talking about virtually all of Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, and about half of each of the surrounding western states, in total.

So that’s my “buzzkill” part of this presentation, just to defuse a little bit of the excitement for you. Still, there is definitely a federal push to develop more oil, gas and mining projects in the United States, and to speed up permitting for those projects, so there might be a boom… it’s just that it’s probably OK if you stop and breathe for a minute before you pull out your credit card or rush to invest in anything, nobody bought Nevada today.

So now that we’re all sad and depressed that maybe we won’t get a 50X windfall tomorrow… what’s the pitch from Jim Rickards? Here’s the FOMO bit:

“This opportunity has an expiration date. And it’s approaching fast.

“June 24th marks the beginning of federal land auctions.

“Once mining companies start writing massive checks to these MDP firms, Wall Street will wake up. Institutional money will flood in.

“The window for individual investors to get in at these rock-bottom prices will slam shut forever.”

And Rickards’ “Phase 2” of this mineral wealth explosion is related to new exploration work that will be done to search for and “claim” these new mineral resources. He says that there are a group of “small stocks” that will be the most important companies for this next phase — and they don’t mine gold, silver, copper, rare earths or anything at all, they get paid just to look for them, so they’re tiny companies that get paid long before mining starts and never touch the minerals.

Rickards describes the “multi-phase” nature of natural resource booms like this:

Phase 1: The government opens the land. Investors get excited. No mining happens yet, this is pure speculation

Phase 2: Operations start, real mining begins, companies get access to the land, and the real work of trying to find the deposits begins.

So Rickards says that this wave of President Trump’s land auctions will open things up, and that after the Bureau of Land Management makes the land available, the mining companies will be rushing to figure out where to explore… which means they need to know where the mineral deposits are likely to be.

He makes a big deal of the “Discovery Requirement” in mining law — which he says means you cannot legally dig for them until you prove where they are. That’s why Phase 2 can create fortunes, we’re told, because there are companies who can find the resources without digging and drilling.

In reality, yes, “Discovery” is an important part of making a mining claim — first you locate the area where you are making a mining claim, set the boundaries and record that claim area with the BLM, assuming nobody else has already claimed it (remember, no auctions here — you’re just looking for gold or copper or whatever on federal land, and if you find it you can mine it). But to make the claim official and valid, you do have to “discover” something on your claim — you have to demonstrate that the material is there (metal, for example), and that a prudent person would accept that it can be mined and marketed at a profit. Which basically just means that you can’t claim land and then just sit on it, you have to actively move that claim forward to actually identifying something worth mining, and eventually justify that discovery with the regulators and/or the courts. I’m not a lawyer, so don’t go digging based on my say-so, but that’s generally how mining exploration on federal land works — stake the area to get first right to explore, find the stuff to prove your claim.

And that’s where Jim Rickards says these small companies come in. In his words:

“Every mining company in America will need these guys. They are the gatekeepers to the largest mineral exploration in history. Could see a sharp demand increase of over 500%.

“This corner of the mining industry was worth only $2 billion last year, with some companies as small as $74 million.”

And apparently they’re gonna get rich, because more land is being opened up and folks will want to use their services to explore that land. The ad says that three companies could dominate this new $100 billion potential market, and that it’s “like owning a metal detector during the world’s biggest gold rush.”

So what’s the story? He says these three companies are Mineral Discovery Prospectors, using the term MDP, but what he’s really talking about are seismic data companies — the firms who collect data about underground or underwater deposits, do underground mapping, and provide the software and horsepower to process and learn from that data, all in order to help to identify oil and gas reservoirs… and to a lesser extent, mineral deposits. Doing a seismic survey does not count as “discovery” for the BLM, in case you’re wondering, so that wouldn’t be enough to solidify your claim on a gold seam on federal land, you’d have to get some more direct evidence as well (drill samples, assays, etc.), but I guess it’s a likely early step for a lot of areas. There are lots of data sources that prospectors use to narrow down the search, including seismic data as well as other electronic surveys (magnetic and gravity measurements), and a lot of surface assessment of the kinds of rock that are generally in an area (digging trenches, pulling surface samples, etc.).

So who are those “three small MDP companies” who Jim Rickards says “have been tasked with creating a new map to identify mineral riches?” I’ll skip over a lot of the repetitive stuff and get right to the clues for you (you’re welcome!):

“These aren’t penny stocks, some have been in business 45 years, and have survived a weak US mining industry.

“Each can handle huge increases in their current revenue without huge capital investments.”

And then a few specifics…

MDP Company #1: The Pioneer

Has Institutional ownership of only 8%, has a track record going back nearly 45 years, including . Mapped legendary eagle ford and bakken shale. Patents. So their services are pivotal, and in demand even outside the resource space. Here’s the screenshot of Rickards talking up this one:

Rickards also says they’ve worked with the DoD, DoE, and President Trump in the past, and that the Department of Homeland Security contracted with them to deploy MDP sensors to identify underground tunnels at the US/Mexico border.

And he says they’ve got leverage over the entire mineral industry, they manufacture their own equipment, in America, and they’ve focused more on broadening their offerings to include mining surveys, while their competitors have mostly focused on oil and gas. (They even recruited a Professor Emeritus from Colorado School of Mines, we’re told.)

So… this firm can apparently locate minerals with “surgical precision,” and the CEO has a history in this business, running a previous company that turned into a 20,000% success story for some investors. And they have lots of patents, and can survey 162 square miles per day, which Rickards says is much faster than their competitors.

This company has a market cap around $74 million, with total revenue of $116 million last year (much of it from defense and international work), and Rickards says they could have $1.8 billion in revenue as soon as next year.

Phew… enough excitement for you? Thinkolator says this one is Geospace Technologies (GEOS), and it’s been flying for the past ten days or so as Rickards has distributed this teaser pitch and as they won a Petrobras contract, so it’s well above $74 million now (market cap today is $215 million). And their CEO didn’t come from Dawson Geophysical, which is what I noted from the presentation as that past 20,000% winner during the early 2000s oil boom, but one of their Board members is Stephen Jumper, the former CEO of Dawson, so maybe I misheard that part of the presentation.

And yes, Geospace did have $116 million in revenue over the past four quarters, and did have a $74 million market cap a month ago. I don’t know where Rickards gets off claiming that it only has 8% institutional ownership, that’s more like 67%, like most companies… but it’s pretty clearly the match for his clues — even to the point of having that connection to the Colorado School of Mines (their Lead Independent Director is Thomas Davis, Professor Emeritus and past director of their Reservoir Characterization Project at that school… though he’s been on the board for almost 30 years now, as long as they’ve been a public company, and is quite clearly more of an oil reservoir guy than a metals prospecting guy).  And yes, one of their subsidiaries, Quantum Technology Solution, did get a Homeland Security contract during President Trump’s first term.

It’s a pretty impressive little company, and that Petrobras contract is a reminder of the amount of opportunity they have in selling equipment and services for oil and gas exploration and reservoir monitoring… but will it grow by more than 10X, to $1.8 billion in revenue next year? Uh, I’d take the “under” on that bet.  And mineral exploration will have almost nothing to do with their revenue over the next year — they may sell more seismic equipment if folks go out to map more new areas, but the company’s efforts at diversification have been mostly in the areas of water management and industrial services, not metals exploration or non-energy mineral mapping. Those two newer areas of focus generate about half of the revenue at GEOS, and energy solutions generates the other half.

You can really see why they tried to diversify the business over the past decade or so, the impact of rising and falling oil prices on their revenue has been pretty stark — this is GEOS revenue (orange), compared to the WTI crude oil spot price (blue) and the GEOS share price (purple), over the past 20 years.

One thing that Rickards said that rings true is that nobody cares about these companies anymore… well, until this past week or two, anyway. GEOS has no analyst coverage, does not provide financial guidance, and it will very much be exposed to oil exploration work and the level of interest in conducting new seismic surveys… so it might well surprise us with a great year if President Trump is really able to turn his “drill, baby drill” mantra into some kind of action. Really, though, even with some increase in the amount of federal land made available for oil and gas lease auctions, that depends mostly on what the oil price is — if it goes higher, companies will spend more to find more… if it goes lower, as had mostly been the recent trend until the Middle East flared up again, they may want to hunker down and cut spending. GEOS is not profitable at the moment, but has been profitable in the past — their best year was 2014, after the shale boom started but before oil prices collapsed, and they also had a solid year of profitability in 2023, but it’s not very steady.

One good note is that they have generally had positive EBITDA or cash flow in most years, so they’re not burning cash, and they’re not issuing a ton of shares, so the company is reasonably managed and I think they’re likely to be steadier in the future than they were in the past, with growing orders for their permanent reservoir monitoring systems (like that Petrobras order last week), and with the growing “smart water” business… but will they have explosive growth over the next year, or justify this recent ludicrous leap in the share price? You’ll have to make the call on that, but I suspect the price spike has a lot to do with Jim Rickards and his promotion, and I think it’s pretty far off base at this point. Despite what Rickards is implying, I’d say the GEOS business has little or nothing to do with how much land BLM makes available for metals prospecting in the months ahead.

To be fair, the share price was probably also overly beat up over the past six months, mostly because of the softness of the oil market… so it might well be that $10-15 is justifiable and the $5-8 range was too cheap in recent weeks. But if you like the story long-term, I’d personally be inclined to wait and see if this recent wild price action settles down, once the attention moves on to something else. Or if the oil price drops again. That’s just my guessing, to be clear, I have no idea whether the next move is up or down for GEOS — that Petrobras PRM deal did sound impressive, and it opens up a new sales area for them, so maybe their earnings will recover and grow and begin to justify this $200 million market cap over the next year or so.

And just as a point of curiosity, as of today, the stock has gotten back to where it was right before COVID hit and crushed the oil market in early 2020. You can check out their latest Investor Presentation here for a quick overview of where they believe they are today.

So… what’s next? What other “MDP” stocks is Rickards pitching beyond “The Pioneer?”

The Second one he calls “The Wildcat” — here’s how he teases the stock, which he says has institutional ownership of only 11% (probably also not true). This is the screenshot from the presentation:

He says this one will profit from a less-followed Executive Order which focuses on deep sea mining, and extracting $100 trillion of underwater minerals. Rickards says they are the company with proven deep sea mapping capability, having successfully mapped hundreds of thousands of square miles across Africa, Norway, and the Gulf of America

They apparently have something called a “Deep-sea pathfinder” project, using autonomous robots underwater to map the ocean floor, and that these “patented autonomous underwater mineral locators” can be dropped in the water and then retrieved a month later, with “perfect maps.”

Offshore surveying is typically double land-based costs, with specialized equipment… and Rickards says that higher cost means higher margins. This firm has apparently had net income growth of 550% , but has been surviving on smaller int’l contracts, and American territorial waters are the holy grail. Rickards is forecasting 1,520% gains for this one.

I don’t know why Rickards calls them “The Wildcat,” but this is almost certainly TGS (TGS in Oslo, TGSNF or TGSGY OTC in the US), formerly known as TGS-NOPEC.   I think it’s still the leading company in offshore seismic these days (I owned the stock a LONG time ago, long before the two Norwegian leaders, TGS and PGS, merged in 2023 to form this large “energy data” company) — and while they do have some capacity to map undersea metals, including with autonomous underwater vehicles, that’s not their main business (their Deep Sea Minerals Pathfinder project is real, that’s data which finds areas of active hydrothermal vents, manganese concentration, or exploration license areas, including the big area being explored by The Metals Co (TMC), the undersea mining firm that was pitched by Matt McCall last year — a well timed pick that has done extremely well on enthusiasm that President Trump will actually push these underwater harvesting projects into reality). The main business at TGS is collecting big data sets and selling them to multiple customers — they just finished a big data collection project in the Gulf of America now, for example (still feels strange to call it that), so their financial results improve as more offshore leases are auctioned off and as more companies pay to see their data on those areas of the Gulf.

Right now, TGS sees the business shrinking a bit in 2025, with some big offshore projects pushed off to 2026 (presumably because of lower oil prices), and with more competition among owners of seismic vessels and equipment driving prices down a bit. They’re talking about cost discipline these days, not growth and excitement. Earnings for 2024 came in about 50% below what the analysts expected, and the analysts currently expect 77 cents per share in earnings in 2025 — so at about US$8.50/share, TGS is now trading at about 11X expected earnings.

There was a big spurt in both revenue and net income in 2024, and at one point at least their operating income did grow by something in the 500-600% range, though that was mostly just a trick of the PGS/TGS merger, which closed in early 2024, the per-share growth was nowhere near that high. This is a pretty reasonable play if you want to bet on the world doing a lot more offshore oil exploration and production in the future, since that makes their data more valuable, and their offshore US data might benefit them extra of President Trump succeeds in his push for a lot more offshore oil production in the US, but their relatively small connection to The Metals Company is probably not going to have a real impact no their income statement (I don’t know that for sure, but the search for offshore polymetallic nodules, and mapping those areas, does not rise to the level of being discussed on their conference calls or featured n presentations or earnings reports, so it’s not likely to be a major driver). And yes, they do some land-based seismic data collection, too, and have some valuable data sets in areas like the Rocky Mountains,  but that’s a smaller part of the business… and still very much focused on oil and gas reservoirs, not underground metals, though perhaps their data would be worthwhile for metals prospectors, too, I confess that I’ve never taken a geology class, and I don’t really know.

If you want a close second, I guess the Dutch company Fugro (FUR.AS, FUGRF) is another large geo-data specialist that has some similar metrics, and could possibly match the clues. They are more diversified, about a third of their business comes from renewables (surveys for offshore wind, especially), and less than half from oil and gas. They also have little to do with mining, but did provide some survey to The Metals Company many years ago. Interesting company in other ways, but less of a match than TGS.

And one more!

Rickards calls the third company, “The Innovator” — and says that this company sells the technology the industry uses, with the implication that all companies in the seismic data space need this particular company’s technology.

He says they provide AI software that “makes modern mineral detection possible.” And that all the companies he talked about above need this technology and their proprietary AI algorithms, so “every major MDP company uses their software” — and as a software provider they have “infinite scalability.” Here’s the screenshot from that part of the presentation:

And he says this company has a market cap of $54 million, with approximately $46 million in annual revenue… but could reach $2 billion in revenue over the next twelve months, so it’s got 4,340% gain potential.

What’s our stock this time? Thinkolator indicates that it’s very likely MIND Technology (MIND), which has recently been right around $46 million in annual revenue ($45 million over the past four quarters), and had a $54 million market cap earlier in the month (this, too, has bumped up with Rickards’ attention, so it’s around $68 million now). MIND Technology is primarily an offshore seismic data collection equipment company, though, with their Seamap brand known for their SeaLink streamer, as well as their Sea Serpent passive arrays (for anti-submarine warfare), and they have gone through some restructuring (selling a sonar business in 2023) to try to improve their profitability.

And, yes, they do have that software business that Rickards hints at as well. They call it their Spectral AI system, used for mapping and analysis and target recognition in seismic data… but at this point, at least, it doesn’t rise to the level of being mentioned in investor presentations or conference calls, and I have no idea whether anyone has bought the software. This is the best match for Rickards’ clues, and they are very involved in seismic collection through their sales of tools and products (and replacement parts), but this is nowhere near being a software company today… maybe in the future, though I don’t have enough imagination to assume that this particular software package is going to important or dominant someday.

If you’re interested in seismic data software as a real growth market, I’d personally look at the decidedly less-sexy Computer Modelling Group (CMG.TO, CMDXF) — that’s run by a guy who has ambitions of becoming a serial acquirer in this space and trying to mimic Constellation Software (and with at least some credibility, Constellation’s COO is Chair of CMG). It’s not the match for Rickards’ clues, they’ve only made a couple acquisitions so far, and they’re not a “growth” story right now, but I expect it has more long-term potential as a software-based compounder. CMG’s last investor presentation is here, in case you’re curious (I don’t own the shares, to be clear, but I’ve seen a lot of folks talk them up over the past year, including Chris Mayer, of 100 Baggers fame, and Pieter Slegers at Compounding Quality).

So there you have it, dear friends — will these three seismic survey-related companies surge tenfold in the coming year, thanks to President Trump’s interest in goosing US energy and minerals production? I gotta confess, that seems like a loopy prediction to me… but that doesn’t mean these are terrible investments, just that you’d probably be wise to temper your expectations a bit if Rickards has you juiced up with his forecasts of 10X returns.   And Geospace and MIND Technology, at least, did go bonkers during an earlier oil bull market, back in 2012 or so, so it’s not insane to do a little daydreaming about a possible spike if we see higher oil prices (TGS did well during that time, too, though it was less dramatic).  Just remember that the oil price has chewed these kinds of companies up before, and they’ve never been able to generate much enduring shareholder value — here’s the  chart of all three if we start in 2010, just after the market crash and before the oil price really went nuts (that’s oil in green, MIND in purple, GEOS in orange, TGS in blue — and I threw in the S&P 500, in pink, just as a reality check):

And, of course, I’ve been wrong before, and when it comes to your money, it’s your thinking that matters. Have a favorite among Rickards’ 3 MDP companies that you think stands out? Other ways to play some growth in mineral exploration in the US, or offshore energy exploration? Do let us know with a comment below… and thanks for reading!