Strategic Intelligence is Jim Rickards’s flagship macro newsletter, published by Paradigm Press and pitched at $49 for six months. If you have seen one of its promos in the past few months, it was probably one of two: the AI Black Paper, warning that the AI stock bubble is about to burst, or “Trump’s Secret $2 Gold Mine,” which points at a single Alaska deposit and a countdown clock set to November 3. A strategic intelligence review comes down to one question: does the research behind those promos justify the subscription?
Who Jim Rickards Is
Rickards is one of the more credentialed people in the financial newsletter business, and the credentials check out. He was general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management and the principal negotiator of the 1998 federal rescue that wound the firm down. He advised the CIA and the Pentagon, and he has written several New York Times bestsellers, including Currency Wars and The Death of Money. He founded Strategic Intelligence roughly 15 years ago around a coherent idea: the global monetary system is fragile, governments eventually devalue currencies to deal with debt, and gold is the asset that survives the reckoning. We cover his background in more detail in our Jim Rickards profile.
The Gold Mine Pitch
“Trump’s Secret $2 Gold Mine” is the newsletter’s current front door. The presentation describes a company that owns “the single largest mineral reserve of its kind on the planet,” worth “up to $2.7 trillion,” holding more than 161 million ounces of gold. The stock, Rickards argues, “could jump by at least another $2 at a bare minimum,” with “10-fold profits or more” possible in “a few short months.”
The stock is Northern Dynasty Minerals (NAK), and the deposit is the Pebble Project in southwest Alaska. Pebble is real and genuinely enormous, one of the largest undeveloped gold and copper resources on earth. The problem is that it has been stuck in permitting fights for more than two decades, and in 2023 the EPA vetoed the project under the Clean Water Act. The November 3 “final decision” the promo promises is not a mine approval. It is the expected timing of a summary-judgment ruling in Northern Dynasty’s lawsuit over that veto, and the Department of Justice is still defending the EPA’s position. Our NAK stock explainer walks through why the ticker is one of the more binary names in the gold sector.
What You Get for the Price
At $49 for six months, the offer is a full subscription to Strategic Intelligence plus a stack of bonus reports, including a gold portfolio report and the AI-themed specials tied to the other promo. The price is anchored against a claimed regular rate of $199 to $299, but the $49 entry price has been available continuously, so treat it as the standard rate rather than a one-time deal. A 90-day money-back guarantee is attached.
The Track Record
This is where a strategic intelligence review has to get honest. By our accounting, Strategic Intelligence’s 2025 portfolio returned roughly negative 25%, and its 2024 portfolio roughly negative 10%. Subscribers have reported losing money on gold and silver miner picks, the exact asset classes the service specializes in. Being intellectually consistent about a coming crisis is one thing; making subscribers money while they wait for it is another.
The gold macro case itself has been right. Central banks have been buying gold at the heaviest pace in decades, and gold has been in a powerful uptrend. But a correct call on the metal has not translated into a winning stock portfolio, and the NAK pick is a live example. The stock was teased around $1.95 in April and traded near $1.61 by mid-August.
What He Gets Right
Rickards deserves credit for consistency. Strategic Intelligence has a clearly stated worldview, complexity theory, geopolitics, and capital flows, and it does not pretend otherwise. The research is well written, and the macro framework, that fiat currencies are ultimately political and that gold is a monetary asset rather than just a commodity, is a genuine differentiator. You can read his AI Black Paper thesis and our Strategic Intelligence newsletter review for the other major argument in the same worldview.
The Verdict
At $49, Strategic Intelligence is a low-cost way to buy a well-argued, consistently bearish macro perspective, and Rickards’s credentials justify attention. Just know what you are buying. The newsletter’s recent record is negative, and the gold mine promo is a binary lottery ticket dressed up as a certainty, with a countdown date that has already moved from April 15 to July 1 to November 3. If you want the macro framework, the subscription is a reasonable price for it. If you are buying it expecting the “secret $2 gold mine” to double your money in minutes, you are paying for the marketing, not the analysis.
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