> The modern oil industry isn't a valid comparison to a gold rush. It's relatively mature, stable, and operating at a global scale that has been captured by a f

> The modern oil industry isn't a valid comparison to a gold rush. It's relatively mature, stable, and operating at a global scale that has been captured by a few dominant players. The oil industry continues to have its gold rush moments, typically every decade or so. At those times you want to own the commodity, the oil rights, you don't want to be the equipment supplier, if you're choosing positions. Every time the price gets high enough, a fever of gold rush mentality hits the industry just the same. The equipment makers did not extract the most value out of the Permian during the gold rush there, the natural resource owners did (including the land owners). > Obviously, if we get to choose with the benefit of hindsight then we will choose the winners. It has nothing to do with hindsight. It's a repeating, predictable pattern. Intel is not primarily a semiconductor equipment maker like Applied Materials, and they sit higher in the pyramid of value than Applied Materials. Apple is not primarily a low value commodity maker down the pyramid of value, it's not difficult to predict who is going to make the most money off of an Apple product; it was not difficult to predict who was going to make the most money during the smartphone gold rush, Apple or the company making/selling lower value components inside of the phone. It's because of the tier that Apple occupies. It wasn't surprising that Microsoft extracted more value from the software gold rush than the company selling computer chairs or desks. It doesn't take challenging guess work to figure out whether the aluminum can maker is going to do better than a first tier positioned company like Pepsi or Coca Cola. That's a trivial thing to figure out. > It's not easy to choose the side of the winners ahead of time, though. That's the point. It's easy to figure out what value tier a company is in. I never suggested it was automatic to figure out which company would be the biggest winner in a tier. You already know who all the players are in a gold rush, you know who owns the mines and who makes the equipment. You can very easily narrow all of this down and research a given company. It's not blindly throwing darts. In a gold rush the big winners among the shovel makers will do worse than the big winners in the resource owning tier (those that own the gold, mines, land or oil).