My foray into rare earths, critical minerals and some defense stocks was initially as a hedge against Trump starting a trade war with China, the increasing risk of military confrontation and the rearming of Europe. All three concerns have occurred to some degree, but it's a long game and actually took a lot longer to play out than I had expected in some cases.

And I get your lack of confidence, I did miss some quick opportunities that I felt were there but I wasn't confident at the time.

The only way to really gain confidence is do your research; read the presentations of each company, particularly their JORC-compliant estimates, time frames to production, how far along the funding path they are, etc.

Use your preferred LLM for deep dives. Whatever you're question, just ask and you'll be surprised at what you learn. For example asking for a cost/effort comparison of the metallurgic processes required for each type of rare earth host material really helped me understand what they were doing, and how each company differed in their approach.

If you like learning random things on Hacker News, deep diving into any technology or industry will not be an issue.