Well, that escalated quickly.
Uranium prices have shot up 60% since mid-August, with spot prices topping out at $48 per pound - their highest level in nine years.
On the one hand, that shouldn't really come as a surprise. In fact, it should have happened much sooner.
Uranium sources have been under-developed ever since the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Back then, uranium prices were as high as $70 per pound, which is about the cost of mining the metal. But in the decade that followed, prices plunged as nuclear power faced a flurry of scrutiny not seen since Chernobyl.
They even fell below $20 per pound at one point, spurring outcries from contrarian investors like myself.
In fact, not to brag (or maybe to brag a little), I called the market bottom...
"Today it's worth just $20.25 per pound," I wrote in 2017. "Still, that's up from where uranium prices were a year ago, which was below $19. So it's actually come up a bit in the past year. In fact, I think it's fair to say we've bottomed out... and any investor with patience and foresight could make a really healthy investment right now."
Today, I'd say that patience paid off. And indeed it has for my Wall Street's Proving Ground subscribers who cashed in gains of 258% and 311% on uranium stocks I recommended last November.
Those recommendations were prompted by a drastic supply-demand imbalance. Indeed, 85% of uranium producers were wiped out of the market from 2011 to 2020 and exploration ground to a halt. So for years, demand outstripped supply, but it didn't much matter because there was so much cheap uranium on the spot market.
There, utilities and investors could acquire the metal for a fraction of what it cost to mine.
Again, for years, that wasn't a problem. But something changed this July.
That is, on July 19, Sprott - the global investment fund that specializes in commodities founded by famed billionaire Eric Sprott - launched the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust.