China, Russia & Japan Are Buying Uranium—Where Is the West?

But I did talk about, you know, the uranium sector, at least the spot price.

Since the last time you and I chatted a number of weeks ago, we finally – broke above $90 a pound.

You know, since we last spoke here, Justin, I think it was about a month ago, what has changed fundamentally with the price?

It's basically just kind of continued an upward trajectory.

And so, you know, the dynamics in the spot market are always kind of shifting.

But what we saw emerge in August was, I guess you could call it traders positioning for a rising price.

So most of the material that is traded in the spot market or most of the traded volume, let's say, in the spot market is actually pounds trading back and forth and changing hands.

It's not end-user demand where the uranium is being purchased by a nuclear utility to eventually go into a reactor.

That's actually a minority of the overall volume traded there.

And so...

Traders' motivations that can be driven by the equities markets, that can be driven by any sort of unique emerging demand in the physical market will oftentimes dictate at least the near-term price movement for the actual physical market.

So in August, we saw we saw in early August kind of a lull in the long term market that lasted not even two weeks.

And then we started to see some other RFPs emerging.

And what that does is especially if the early years in that RFP are so like the first delivery years are next year or even 2028. even if it's a smaller RFP for maybe a half a million pounds or something like that per year, you'll see some traders start to kind of wiggle and move around that.

You'll see some material be procured and that's exactly what we saw.

And so if we go back, let's say three years to 2023, kind of a similar setup where you had a couple of RFPs start to tighten the market and then you just had anybody who had material that could potentially be sold, hold on to that material more tightly.

And we're seeing a little bit of that here.

So traders are kind of expecting the price to keep moving higher, so they're not motivated to sell it.

Utilities and even some producers have been happy to buy even the smallest little dip in price.

So as soon as it meaningfully goes up a dollar or two, if it drops back down 50 cents, like somebody's in there to buy it.

So it's not raging higher here, but the floor is quite firm.

And there's plenty of interested parties on the buy side as soon as any weakness is shown or any kind of motivated selling is there.

And that's spot market specific.

And in the term market, there's some really interesting things happening, which we can get into if you'd like.