Ask most people where a large Australian fund manager is putting its biggest money and few would say uranium. Aitken, investment director at Regal Partners, said on the Switzer Show it is now one of the firm’s largest positions, because he thinks the upside from here is material.
It all depends on the price you watch, however.
Uranium trades in two markets: a spot price, quoted daily, and a long-term price that power utilities actually contract at. The term price is the one Aitken watches, and it is rising. It reached about US$95 a pound by the end of June, its highest level since 2008, and now sits above the roughly US$85 spot price.
Despite the radioactive conversation about nuclear power in Australia recently, demand is growing globally for uranium. Reactors are being built and restarted, utilities have spent years buying less fuel than they need, and the power demands of AI data centres have put nuclear back in favour. Aitken frames it as the world “losing its irrational fear of nuclear power.”
Gold is the other place he sees value. After a run to a record near US$5,600 an ounce in late January, the metal fell hard, through its worst quarter since 2013, to about US$4,000 by early July, before steadying near US$4,080. Aitken says that correction has “most likely played out.” He points to the buyers who stepped in as the price dropped: China’s central bank added the most gold in more than two years in June, buying into the fall.
For exposure, he leans toward gold miners, through a gold-equity ETF, rather than only the metal. Those miners tend to move further than gold itself in both directions, so they carry more risk on the way down as well as more leverage to a recovery.
The number Aitken is watching is the uranium term price. It is rising now, and while it keeps rising, he says, the spot price is the wrong thing to focus on.
