Welcome back, GoldBuzzers.

A very happy Easter to you.

Today’s Deep Dive is all about why a portfolio of mining stocks beats picking individual stocks - and I’ve got the data to prove it.

Ok. Let’s get into it. 👇

With markets closed for Good Friday, Gold closed the week at $4,676, down 2.3% at Thursday’s close. Silver settled around $73, off a similar amount. Both metals gave back the week’s early gains as the dollar surged on safe-haven flows tied to the Iran conflict, after President Trump’s Wednesday night speech made it seem unlikely the conflict was going to be ending soon.

Things rapidly escalated, with an F-15E Strike Eagle shot down over Iran on Thursday, a second aircraft down near the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S./Israeli strikes destroying the B1 bridge near Tehran. Then on Saturday, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum demanding Iran reopen the Strait or face what he called "all hell." Tehran dismissed the threat and reiterated IRGC control over the waterway.

The rising dollar and surging oil prices are fueling inflation expectations and pushing rate cut hopes further out of reach. The Fed held steady in March, and the probability of an April cut sits near zero. Gold is now down roughly 16% from its January all-time high of $5,595. Silver has lost over 20% from its peak near $122 in the same period.

The structural bull case hasn't changed. Central banks bought gold for the 15th straight month in January. Goldman Sachs just reaffirmed its $5,400 target, and JPMorgan still holds $6,300. But the short-term picture belongs to the dollar and the war. Until there's clarity on Hormuz, precious metals remain hostage to the headlines.

Most investors make the same mistake. They put way too much energy into trying to find the one stock that's going to be a ten-bagger - and not nearly enough into building a portfolio that works whether or not they pick the right one.

For all those of you who applied to be founding members of GoldBuzz INSIDER, the reason for the slight delay in launching is because several of our beta testers had requested the inclusion of a stock portfolio, and since that was added, we wanted to give them adequate time to test it.

(For new subscribers who haven’t yet heard of INSIDER, you can catch up by reading our recent articles here and here.)

Over the past few months, I’ve had some vital technical assistance in completing the separate R&D necessary to build a mining stock portfolio strategy within the INSIDER infrastructure, and today I want to share what I’ve learned.

Let’s start with what our INSIDER portfolio actually looked like six months ago in October, when 20 gold miners met the strict criteria for inclusion, and see what that portfolio looks like now:

19 of 20 stocks in profit. The best performer - Lahontan Gold - up 250%. SSR Mining more than doubled. Even large caps like Kinross and AngloGold Ashanti delivered 28% and 39% gains. The only stock in the red was NexGold, down less than 2%.

We didn't know six months ago that Lahontan would be the standout. Nobody did. And that's exactly the point.

You Don't Need to Find the Winner. You Need to Be Holding It.

As part of the portfolio R&D, we analyzed thousands of individual trades across 230 mining stocks over the past 10 years, and the median return on any single pick was essentially zero. But the average was far higher - between 7% and 11% per trade - because a small number of big winners in every batch pulled the average up.

That's the nature of mining stocks. Most move sideways. A few explode. The skill isn't in predicting which ones will run. It's in building a portfolio of quality miners so that when one of them takes off, you're already in it. Look at the snapshot above - you'll see everything from a $0.10 junior (the biggest gainer) to a $72 major like AngloGold Ashanti. The system doesn't care about market cap. If a miner scores well, it's in.

How We Built the INSIDER Portfolio

Every design decision behind the INSIDER Portfolio was tested against 10 years of data. We didn't go with gut feel. We tested on unseen data, measured, and locked each parameter one at a time.

Why 20 stocks? We tested portfolio sizes from 10 to 30. At any given time, our filters typically identify 13-14 miners that meet all the criteria. A cap of 20 means we capture essentially the full qualifying universe. Go smaller and you're arbitrarily excluding good names. Go bigger and you're spreading capital too thin across marginal picks. Twenty gave us the best risk-adjusted returns of any size we tested.

Why gold miners only? We tested gold miners, silver miners, and mixed portfolios. Gold outperformed on every metric. In fact, the mixed portfolio ended up being 75-90% gold miners anyway - silver names rarely made the top 20. Gold-only was simpler to communicate and performed better. Perhaps in future, we’ll have a separate silver miners portfolio, but for now the data says to stick with gold miners.

Why weekly rebalancing? We tested daily, weekly, and monthly rebalancing. Weekly was the clear winner. Monthly rebalancing misses momentum - a miner whose score improves on a Tuesday doesn't get picked up until next month. Weekly catches rising miners fast enough to ride the wave, while still being practical for subscribers to execute on a Monday morning.

Built-In Protection

The portfolio doesn't just pick stocks. It also knows when to step aside. Two quantitative signals - Max Return and Min Risk - monitor market conditions daily and move the portfolio to cash when conditions turn unfavorable.

Max Return stays invested most of the time, accepting larger drawdowns in exchange for higher total returns. You can see the results in the performance table above, +899% on the portfolio with the Max Return signal from 2020 to October 2025 - nearly five times the return of GDX buy-and-hold, with substantially more profit generated since then.

Min Risk takes a different approach. It sits in cash almost two-thirds of the time, only investing when conditions are clearly favorable. Even so, it still doubled the return of GDX over the same period. The real payoff is in the drawdowns - Min Risk's worst peak-to-trough decline was roughly 20%, compared to around 32% for Max Return and 45% for GDX buy-and-hold. For investors who value sleeping at night, that matters.

Both signals kept subscribers out of the worst of the 2022 gold correction - the kind of drawdown that wipes out months of gains in a matter of weeks.

What's Next

The INSIDER Portfolio beta testing is now entering its final phase and we’ll be opening the doors to founding members soon. The Portfolio joins the daily Trading Signals and Mining Stock Rankings to complete the three-part INSIDER service. I’m also bringing on board some additional help for mining stock research so that I can provide daily weekday commentaries on all three parts of the service. We aim to make INSIDER the most comprehensive service available to anyone who wants to ride this precious metals bull market.

If you've already applied for a founding membership, don’t worry - your name is in the database and you don’t need to do anything. I’ll be in touch soon. But because of the delay, the founding membership window has now been extended while we finish testing the portfolio. If you’d like to be added to the list for early access and the discount, please reply to this email with the word INSIDER.

Most investors in this sector spend their time looking for the next big winner. The data says that's the wrong game. The edge is in building a filtered, diversified portfolio of quality miners, rebalancing regularly, and having a system that tells you when to step aside. As the snapshot above shows, get those three things right, have a little patience, and the individual winners take care of themselves.

That’s all for this Sunday, folks! I’ll see you on Tuesday.

Before you go, please take a moment to rate today’s GoldBuzz and tell us how we did.

Rick Adams
Founder, GoldBuzz
rick@goldbuzz.com