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I was thinking of something like an exchange-traded fund (etf) or any kind of high liquidity investment vehicle, with a market animated by the financial institution managing the fund, and a management target of replicating the spot price of uranium ore (the underlying).

Such things can be build without actually holding much, if any, physical ore: by proper assembly of ore futures and of shares and derivatives of listed uranium prospection/mining/processing companies with a track record of correlation between ore spot / share spot.

I must confess I already hold such a thing for crude oil (and I'm a peak oil believer). And lately, I bet on a leveraged put on the french stock markets (so you can count me in the "hard landing" proponents). Of course, these two investments hedge each other to some extent.

Pierre

by Pierre on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 04:12:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Based on the wsj article, I think there are two eft's.  From WSJ,
Two new publicly traded uranium investment funds are adding to the competition. The funds are similar to gold and silver exchange-traded funds, raising money from investors in initial public offerings of shares to buy uranium.
I imagine this is one of the two.
New Uranium Participation Corp. Follows Gold ETF Footprints

By David J. DesLauriers
30 May 2005 at 06:05 PM GMT-04:00

TORONTO (ResourceInvestor.com) -- Uranium is trading at 23-year highs and has been quite a hot topic in the last few months, with many well-known resource bulls and prognosticators calling for much higher prices before the end of this decade.  Aside from all of the juniors rushing to stake and revive projects of dubious value, a group has come together to facilitate a direct bet on uranium for retail and institutional investors.  This is similar to the various Gold ETFs in Australia, London, Toronto and New York that have taken billions of dollars of gold off of the market, with the most popular ETF, StreetTracks [NYSE:GLD] now holding more than $2 billion worth of gold bullion in trust.

UPC

Uranium Participation Corporation [TSX:U] recently raised C$100 million in an IPO at C$5.  As of May 10 the company had made commitments to buy 1.85 million pounds, or 835 tons, of uranium at $27.87 a pound for a total of $52 million.

UPC follows in the footsteps of Portland, Oregon-based fund Adit Capital Management, which started buying uranium in December, and reportedly had physical uranium valued at more than $26 million.

I'm thinking about investing,,,maybe speculating is a better word here,,,,in this one.  I have so far limited myself to uranium mining stocks.  
They have done very well, up to 4 times my investment in some of the stocks.  I've kept adding to the portfolio, so the % increase at this point is less, at 66%.  It's a small part of my investing, mainly because I don't really feel I understand the market well enough, or the companies well enough.  I'm more of an investor than a speculator.  If I could find more data on things like capacities of current mines, requirements of current uranium facilities, new facilities on the drawing boards and anticipated commissioning dates, prospects for new mining find more uranium and the time required to scale up, etc, etc--good data would make me interested in studying it more and likely investing more.
by wchurchill on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:20:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Very interesting find. Just a pity it's listed in Toronto, that would give terrible broker fees from France. Also, backing it with physical ore will probably limit the number of shares they can emit (which can lead them to overshoot the ore spot if there are many people interested - all the better for those who got in ...)

I've been very wary of putting money in uranium firms: most new ones are just exploratory start ups, and only those few which really find the richest veins will keep growing. Established mines with a track record and predictable production/reserves are under control of big companies, sometime states (Areva, parent of Cogema, one of the world's biggest, is only a few % floated, through just ADR-like stuff, the rest is french state, and it's not even a commodity pure-player: they also build the reactors and provide lots of services).

Pierre

by Pierre on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:27:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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