Mineral exploration companies are the firms that find deposits before anyone mines them. They stake claims, run geophysical surveys, drill test holes, and try to prove that a body of ore is big and rich enough to justify a mine. It is a boom-and-bust business: most exploration projects find nothing, and the winners are usually sold to or bought out by larger producers.
This is the world Jim Rickards reaches for in his “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation. Rickards, a former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management and a best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, runs model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter. His pitch claims President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals,” and that mining companies are “legally required to find the exact location of these mineral deposits BEFORE they can dig a single hole.” The twist is that the three companies he names are not mineral explorers at all.
Explorers Versus Surveyors
A mineral exploration company bears the geological risk. It spends its own or its investors’ money looking for a deposit, and most of the time it comes up empty. The reward is the discovery, which can re-rate a tiny stock overnight if the ore body is significant.
A survey firm is a different business. It sells the tools and data used in that search, the seismic equipment, the geophysical services, the licensed data sets. It gets paid whether or not a deposit is found. That distinction is the heart of the pitch, and it is the part that actually holds up: the picks-and-shovels provider is a lower-risk way to bet on exploration activity than a single exploration company.
The Three Names and the Scoreboard
The presentation names three “MDP” picks, short for mineral discovery technology. They are Geospace Technologies, a maker of land and marine seismic equipment with about $116 million in trailing revenue; TGS ASA, the Norwegian energy-data firm formed from the 2023 TGS and PGS merger; and MIND Technology, a maker of offshore seismic hardware under the Seamap brand with about $46 million in annual revenue.
Since the tease, Geospace is down 73.8% and MIND is down 56.8%, while TGS is up 8.9%. That is one single-digit gain and two large losses, set against promised returns of “1,520% gain potential” to “4,800% gain potential.” We walked through the discovery technology in our AI mineral exploration coverage and the seafloor side in our deep-sea mining explainer.
The Category Gap
The honest read is that all three are oil and gas seismic companies, and their revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets for decades, not mineral discovery. TGS ASA and MIND Technology both had their moment during the 2010 to 2012 oil bull market and gave most of it back. Framing them as pure plays on a mining boom means betting that a small sliver of their business becomes the main driver, a leap the ad never supports with numbers.
The institutional-ownership claim is another tell. The ad says one pick has ownership of “only 8%,” implying early entry. Our teardown found the real figure near 67%. We put the policy and market picture in context in our rare earth stocks coverage and our critical minerals strategy explainer.
The Stages of a Mineral Hunt
Mineral exploration runs in stages, and each one spends money on survey work. First comes grassroots exploration, a cheap and broad search over large areas using magnetics, gravity, and geochemistry. Then comes follow-up, where targets get drilled to test whether anomalies are real. Finally comes resource definition, the expensive drilling and modeling that proves a deposit is big and rich enough to mine. At every stage, a surveyor or equipment maker can earn revenue, which is why the picks-and-shovels framing has genuine merit. The catch is that most of that survey spend today comes from oil and gas and from large established miners, not from a sudden federal land rush. The Birthright pitch collapses all of this into a single imminent wave of mineral discovery spending, when in practice exploration budgets move slowly and follow commodity prices. That is the honest gap between how mineral exploration actually works and how the ad describes it. Survey and equipment firms will keep earning on whatever exploration happens; the question is only how much, and how soon.
A Fair Frame
The pick-and-shovel logic is genuinely sound, and these are legitimate, established survey businesses. A real rebound in exploration spending, whether for energy or minerals, would help all three. The offer behind the pitch is The Situation Report at $1,995 per year with no refunds, and the headline numbers are promotional forecasts, not promises. If you want mineral exploration exposure, know that these names are surveyors first, and that the distance between that reality and the “Birthright” framing is the part worth watching.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the American Birthright presentation.
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