Wheat, uranium, its all the same!
From a recent article in Money Week...
By the end of 2006, come New Year prediction time, uranium was the hot tip for 2007 (just as grains were this year). For five years or more the price of uranium had crept up beautifully, without anyone appearing to notice.
Then suddenly in October 2006 the well-documented flood at Cameco’s Cigar Lake mine made the headlines and everyone began talking uranium. “Supply can’t match demand,” declared the bulls. “China’s building so-many thousand nuclear power plants a year,” they went on. “Where’s the uranium going to come from?” “It takes ten years to get a uranium mine into production”; “Nuclear power is the only answer to the coming energy crisis”, and so on.
The thing is there was a great deal of truth to all these arguments and the uranium price went from a steady incline to a near-vertical ascent. Having stealthily risen from below $10 a pound to $70, it suddenly bounded another $70 to $140. Everyone was talking uranium. Every exploration company had suddenly added the word uranium to its name. Stocks were soaring. Even the Labour Government began talking nuclear. Then suddenly the stocks capitulated and over the next few months we saw brutal corrections in the uranium companies - in some cases, of 80% or more.
Uranium had traced out the typical pattern of a bubble from boom to bust. I have posted this excellent chart from Jean-Paul Rodrigue of Hofstra University before. But it merits re-posting. The typical small uranium stock traced a very similar pattern and in my view, grains may be doing the same.
Looks just like wheat doesn't it!
Full story: here
By the end of 2006, come New Year prediction time, uranium was the hot tip for 2007 (just as grains were this year). For five years or more the price of uranium had crept up beautifully, without anyone appearing to notice.
Then suddenly in October 2006 the well-documented flood at Cameco’s Cigar Lake mine made the headlines and everyone began talking uranium. “Supply can’t match demand,” declared the bulls. “China’s building so-many thousand nuclear power plants a year,” they went on. “Where’s the uranium going to come from?” “It takes ten years to get a uranium mine into production”; “Nuclear power is the only answer to the coming energy crisis”, and so on.
The thing is there was a great deal of truth to all these arguments and the uranium price went from a steady incline to a near-vertical ascent. Having stealthily risen from below $10 a pound to $70, it suddenly bounded another $70 to $140. Everyone was talking uranium. Every exploration company had suddenly added the word uranium to its name. Stocks were soaring. Even the Labour Government began talking nuclear. Then suddenly the stocks capitulated and over the next few months we saw brutal corrections in the uranium companies - in some cases, of 80% or more.
Uranium had traced out the typical pattern of a bubble from boom to bust. I have posted this excellent chart from Jean-Paul Rodrigue of Hofstra University before. But it merits re-posting. The typical small uranium stock traced a very similar pattern and in my view, grains may be doing the same.
Looks just like wheat doesn't it!
Full story: here
