Two weeks ago I told you the uranium spot price comes from two private companies with phones, and that I'd write next about the licensing maze around uranium data.
That's still coming. But something more useful happened first: I built the thing this whole newsletter is supposed to support. The dashboard is live.
So this issue is short and has one job: show you what I made, and be honest about what it is and isn't.
The one number the market won't give you
Last time we established the problem: there's no uranium ticker. The real spot price is a weekly survey number, proprietary, licensed for thousands a year, and nobody outside the deal-making sees it live.
I can't republish that number. So I did the next best thing. I built a model that estimates it from data that is public.
I'm calling it the UE Spot Estimate. It updates daily from the latest market close, and you'll find the current value live on the dashboard.
Read that word carefully: estimate. This is not the official TradeTech or UxC spot price, and I won't pretend it is. It's a model's best guess and the only honest way to ship something like that is to show you how well it tracks over time. That's exactly what the dashboard does.
What's actually currently on the dashboard
Three things, all free, no login:
- The UE Spot Estimate: the daily number, front and center.
- The 15 uranium names I started tracking: producers, developers, the physical trusts, the ETF. Price and recent performance in one table. (More information about the tickers will come.)
- Mining-equity sentiment: how the producer stocks have moved over 7 and 30 days. When equities run hotter than the spot estimate, the market may be front-running supply; when they lag, there might be catch-up room.
It's deliberately simple. This is v1.
One thing the data already taught me
Building the estimate, I expected the big producers - Cameco, Kazatomprom - to do the heavy lifting in the model. They didn't. The signal came almost entirely from two physical uranium trusts.
Producer stocks seem to mostly follow the spot price rather than predict it. That surprised me enough that it's getting its own issue soon, with the actual numbers.
How honest is it?
That's the right question, and I want you holding me to it. The model produces a daily estimate. But the uranium spot price is only publicly reported once a month. So that's when I can actually check how close it was. Each month, once a new reference value comes out, I log the difference on the dashboard. That's the track record, building one data point at a time. In other words: daily estimates, monthly accountability. That's the honest rhythm this market allows, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The full methodology, how it's built, the error margins, what it can and can't do, is a proper deep-dive coming soon. (Right after the licensing maze, which I really am writing this time.)
Try it
The dashboard is here: uraniniteedge.com/dashboard
It's free, it'll get better every month, and the whole point is to build it in the open. If you find something wrong or missing, tell me, that's the entire reason I do this publicly.
More soon.
— Maximilian