MacroVoices #466 Guy Keller: The Nuclear Story Has Never Been Better
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This is Macro Voices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, high net worth individuals, family offices, and other sophisticated investors. Macro Voices is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance and macroeconomics telling it like it is, bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna.

Macro Voices Episode 466 was produced on February 6, 2025. I'm Eric Townsend. Tribeca Nuclear Energy Opportunity Fund Manager Guy Keller returns as this week's feature interview guest. We'll discuss all things nuclear, from why spot uranium and uranium miners haven't followed enriched uranium prices higher, to where the best opportunities are in the nuclear sector.

And I'm Patrick Ceresna with the macro scoreboard week over week as of the close of Wednesday, February 5th, 2025. The S&P 500 index up 36 basis points, trading at 6,061. Market remains quiet throughout the earnings season. We'll take a closer look at that chart and the key technical levels to watch in the postgame segment. The U.S. dollar index

trading down 27 basis points, trading at 107.62. The headline percentage change does not fully capture the significant volatility sparked by the tariff drama. The March WTI crude oil contract down 219 basis points, trading at 7103. No sign of dip buyers as oil falls back into the trade range.

Q4 the March are Bob gasoline up 49 basis points trading at 207 the April gold contract up 358 basis points trading at 2893 in a full bull trend working toward the 3000 level copper up 374 basis points trading at 444 bullishly trying to break out after spending most of last year in a downtrend and

Uranium down 78 basis points trading at 70.05. And the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield down 9 basis points trading at 4.44. Key news to watch is this Friday's U.S. jobs numbers. And next week, we have the CPI and PPI inflation numbers and the U.S. retail sales.

This week's feature interview guest is Tribeca Nuclear Energy Opportunity Fund manager Guy Keller. Eric and Guy discuss uranium, government policy, tech companies' involvement in nuclear, and the impact of tariffs on supply. Eric's interview with Guy is coming up as Macro Voices continues right here at MacroVoices.com. Macro Voices

And now with this week's special guest, here's your host, Eric Townsend.

Joining me now is Tribeca Investment Partners Fund Manager Guy Keller. Guy, it's great to get you back in the show. I can't believe it's been, wow, almost five years. I want to start with a chart that I know you're familiar with. Listeners, you'll find it in this week's uranium section of the postgame chart deck. That is Ocean Walls chart comparing the price appreciation of Yellow Cake Uranium versus UF6 versus Enriched Uranium Products.

Guy, what this shows us is that the bull market in uranium that you and I and a lot of other people predicted is on. It's on in spades. It's a raging bull market in enriched uranium nuclear reactor fuel, which is up 506 percent in the last three years.

The price of it more than doubled in calendar year 2024 alone. The thing is, we can't invest in enriched uranium. We can only invest in the uranium feedstock that it's made from. That's down on the year in 2024, despite the fact that I think there's an argument to be made that 2024 might just be the biggest bull year ever in terms of news flow for the nuclear industry. Guy, what's going on? How is this possible?

Yeah, thanks, Eric, and great to be back on your show again. I've been very excited about this. It is a head-scratcher, and I think it comes down to just simple capacity. The end user for uranium are nuclear utilities. Most of them are not just nuclear. They live in companies that are also producing electricity from a number of other sources.

The nuclear fuel buyer is also the same team or sometimes individual that is responsible for refueling and maintenance and a whole bunch of other things.

And so they, I just think it's just, they just lack the capacity to look across the whole fuel cycle. You've seen some very, obviously, changes from the US government with the Russian import ban of enriched product and then the Russian retaliation in restricting exports of enriched product to the US. There's lots of back and forth as to further sanctions from Europe and other parts of the world on enriched product from Russia and

And as you know and your listeners know, a large part of the enriched uranium that's required to make nuclear fuel rods comes from Russia. It's one part of the nuclear fuel cycle. And so I think because you've had all of that uncertainty and you've had especially US utilities having to scramble to ensure that they can replace that Russian material, they've kind of just

been forced to ignore the uranium upstream side of the equation because, you know, the EUP, the enriched uranium product, is much more near term for them. We used to take sort of two years from mine mouth to reactor core for the yellow cake to move through the fuel cycle. With the Russian sanctions, that can now be closer to three years.

So the uranium required for tomorrow's enriched uranium product is three years away. So as I said, I think it's just that they've been forced to focus further downstream to solve a near-term problem and assuming that they'll eventually have to come back to the uranium. And I think they will. I mean, last year was surprising in how little uranium was contracted, given that the term price of uranium appreciated throughout the year and held,

at that $82, $83 level despite the volatility in the much less traded spot price.

Well, I agree with you that the spot price seems to perhaps have been manipulated lower, but it certainly is not reflecting the more accurate term price, which did grow in 2024. But boy, nothing close to what we saw in terms of appreciation in the Enrich product. Now, the next thing that's confusing to me, if you listen to the narratives from analysts and you talk about a bottleneck in conversion and enrichment,

most of them will tell you, yeah, you know, the problem's really in the conversion more so than the enrichment. That's where we really have a little bit of a supply bottleneck, not quite enough conversion capacity. But Guy, if I look at this chart from OceanWall, what this is screaming out is that the problem is in enrichment because that price divergence between U308, which is the yellow cake raw uranium, and UF6, which is the output from the conversion process,

that's not where the big divergence is. The big divergence is between the output from convergence and the output from enrichment. That would suggest, at least from the signal that the price signal that the market is giving us, it seems to be indicating that the problem is some kind of bottleneck in enrichment capacity. So which is it actually? And why would the price be indicating something other than what the narrative is that all the analysts seem to agree on?

Well, I think the answer to that is the bottlenecks in both. It was just the motivation of the converters and the enrichers to build more capacity required a commitment from those utilities to lock in contracts to guarantee that, you know, because building enrichment is a pretty large capex. It can be complicated. It requires some precision engineering. Building conversion is not as complex, but

On both occasions, you've seen the facilities say, we can expand capacity and conversion or we can restart capacity and conversion. However, we don't want you running back to the cheaper Russian supply if, for example, Donald Trump decides to make peace with the Russians and all that goes away because we've got to go and find that money. And with enrichment, there was a little bit more of a standoff

because the nearer term, again, you know, the Russians were providing a full service, so you're getting enriched product at the end of it, as opposed to having to push it through a converter and then enrich it. And so there was a bit more of a standoff there because the dollar amounts were, as I said, in the billions to expand this. And that seems to have solved and that capacity will be built. But again, from the Iranian perspective,

If you're sourcing uranium now in 2025, you're actually solving for a 2027, 2028 delivery of your enriched product. So, in fact, you're pricing it now to put into that expanded capacity. And I think that's what you're going to see this year is looking through that where the utilities say, well,

The price of conversion and enrichment has not come down. So therefore, we probably need to just lock this in and make sure we can get it because there's no guarantee that peace is made with Russia. And even if it is, do we want that risk of a future conflict resulting in exactly the same problem?

Could it be that what's going on here is people are looking at this and say, okay, there's only so much conversion and enrichment capacity, particularly enrichment capacity as we look longer term available in the West. Uh, why would I want to continue to build up my U three Oh eight yellow cake stockpiles? If what's about to happen might be that I'm going to be forced to buy EUP from Russia, uh,

because there won't be enough enrichment capacity. Therefore, I'm not going to be able to use my feedstock that I have here, so I'm not buying. I'm just trying to understand why in the world with this, you know, this change

This chart is so obvious, it's so glaring. You know the fuel buyers have seen this chart, but they're not responding saying, "I better take advantage of these low prices." And I think that despite the fact that it's historically not a low price, I think these $80 prices for yellow cake uranium are low prices in the face of what's going on here. Nobody's rushing to buy anything. So what's going on? - If you flip it to their view of the upstream,

Utilities are still of the belief that every promoter of a development site of uranium who tells them that they're going to be a viable mine, a lot of these utilities are still believing that that's going to happen. So they're all kind of sitting there saying,

you know, the market's going to solve this. I've got 12 development projects all telling me they're going to be on. And I've got the WNA telling me that these are planned and prospective projects. And I've got the price reporters also telling me that these projects are going to come on. And so therefore, I'm not going to have to chase the Iranian price because they're all going to come to me hat in hand saying, please write me a contract so I can get the funding for it.

And I think that's a really dangerous and wrong assumption because as we've seen in 2024 from restart projects, I think almost all of those have had some stumbles. Most of them have got through it and most of them will get through it. But these are uranium projects that used to produce and we're just turning them back on again. God knows what's going to happen when we get these greenfield sites and how these

utilities of the belief that just because there's a well-paid promoter telling you that they're going to turn their mind on and wherever in the next two years, I guarantee you that they're going to be slipping on that. So I think there's a little bit of an apathy there from the utilities on the uranium side. However, they're looking at that

conversion and enrichment, hearing the bottlenecks all the time, because as you said, there's plenty of people saying there's bottlenecks and telling them there's bottlenecks. So they're a little bit more panicked to chase that because at the end of the day, if you don't have enriched uranium product, you don't have fuel rods and you don't have electricity. And that's going to cause you a number of problems, not only with your customers, but also the governments, you know? So the governments are really, really pushing the nuclear fuel cycle

to these utilities as well and saying, make sure you got that sorted out. So I think there's a little bit of, as I said, stuff going on at both ends that are just based on wrong assumptions. Now, your name was in the news a few weeks ago when you made a prediction that the tech boys would get involved in the nuclear fuel cycle, not just in the nuclear reactor companies. Just a couple of weeks after you made that prediction, we got news that Peter Thiel's fund was

investing in one of the fuel cycle companies. So congratulations on getting the call right. But let's go a little deeper. What did you mean when you say the tech bros are going to get involved in the fuel cycle? Get involved in what way? Doing what? Having what influence? So

What I've been referring back to has been the battery electric vehicle build-out where a lot of these disruptors came in, the Teslas, the Chinese companies, you know, that had never built automobiles before, came in and were able to get a foothold in that sector and compete against the old world ICE manufacturers who were then scrambling to change. What then happened was you saw an almost uniformed

panic move towards, oh my Lord, if we're building these and the old guys are building these as well, where are we going to get the raw materials from? So you started to see OEMs and gigafactories and things really scrambling to try to secure a supply of the raw materials. And in some cases, write checks to developers up front to get these mines built so that they could guarantee that.

I don't think that's necessarily going to happen in this first wave of tech bros in that way because most of the electron securement through nuclear is going to current nuclear power plants operators and getting them to restart or re-rate or rebuild idle projects or even start building new gigawatt scale.

But I think it would be naive to assume that these tech companies aren't aware of the whole nuclear fuel cycle and the precarious state around the supply of uranium and the rest of that fuel cycle. So I think they're going to be in the background to these utilities and saying to them, show us.

that you have contracted uranium supply because we're paying you two times wholesale prices to secure these electrons. We don't want you turning around saying, we don't have enough fuel and we're going to have to divert the electricity we can produce to our retail grid and to keep mum's and dad's lights on, but you're not getting any. So I suspect they're going to be in there behind, if not already behind,

It would surprise me a lot if these guys, you know, they're committing to hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of electricity contracts. They'd want to make sure that the fuel is accounted for. When we progress to the next stage that Trump alluded to, I think around Stargate, where these guys will be building electricity generation on their own sites.

You'll definitely see tech companies come in stage two saying, right, we're contracted to go and build these SMRs or advanced reactors. And by the way, we've just gone and secured 20 years worth of fuel and booked the Haleu and everything else we need because we don't want to be caught short. You know, they're spending billions of dollars on data centers. They're going to want to make sure that their power providers don't run out of uranium.

Now, you just alluded to HALU fuel. Let's talk a little bit more about that. Some of the advanced reactors, in fact, I'd say most of the Generation 4 advanced designs that the tech pros are focusing on are sodium fast reactors that have to use essentially high-test petrol, which is the HALU fuel. It's enriched not to 3% or 4%, but to almost 20% U-235. What that means is a couple of things. One is the ratio of

of yellow cake uranium is much higher. You need about 50 pounds of yellow cake uranium to make one pound of HALU. And of course, the exact amount depends on overfeeding and underfeeding and some details of the production process. But it's about a 50 to 1. It's a really big

demand in terms of that U-308, but it also means a lot more enrichment capacity, more SWUs are needed. It seems to me like a lot of this excitement around all of these sodium fast reactors and how cool they are technologically has occurred without a lot of discussion of where all the halo is going to come from, because they're talking about building a lot of these things, and that's

a lot of SWUs, a lot of enrichment facilities that don't exist yet, as far as I can tell. It seems to me that favoring those reactor designs, if you don't build the enrichment capacity to go with it, is going to put us in a situation where you're backed into, okay, now we're forced to buy our EUP from Russia again, because they've got maybe not a

corner on the uranium market in terms of yellow cake, but they do kind of have a corner on spare enrichment capacity. Am I right to think that's a risk and what are people doing about it? Well, I think this is exactly why you've seen the U.S. Department of Energy be a real leader in this respect with a couple of billion dollars of grants towards progressing Haleo in the U.S.,

And I think when you would peel back the layers, you'd also find that France and the UK and Korea and other countries and potentially Canada, although some of their designs don't necessarily need Haleo, but it's governments driving that now, which is again, probably why there's so much focus on the fuel cycle because

because you're seeing those headlines. You're seeing Department of Energy come out with massive, massive grants and people saying, how do I invest in that? That looks interesting. Oh, I can't really. So yeah, it's going to require more work, especially from the US government, which seems to be leading this. And, you know, look, I honestly believe that, yes, there's a risk. And as you and I have discussed many times, you know, there are a huge amount of competing designs

And not all of them are going to get past the post. There's probably going to be a few winners that each government sort of adopts as their mascot design, if you like, so that you can get those synergies. And if they can't solve a Haleo supplier problem, then they obviously want it going to one or two developers who are actually going to build them.

But there is, there's a lot of work to be done. And you could probably argue that once Trump 2.0 was done pushing up tariff headlines every second second, and they focus on their mantra of making America great again, you could probably argue that the whole drive to

to reduce bureaucracy and push innovation maybe brings this along a little bit quicker than the previous administration. But you're right, there's still a lot of work to do and you can't just make your bet on that one technology design.

Let's come back to the tariffs that you mentioned. I should disclose to our listeners, we're recording this interview on Monday afternoon, about three days before our listeners will hear it. Now, just eight hours ago, as we were recording, basically the sky was falling, a hundred point gap down open on the S&P futures. The world's coming to an end because Trump put these tariffs on both Canada and Mexico. Eight hours later, as we're recording the

tariffs on Mexico have already been lifted. The Mexican president came to the negotiating table. I guess they've actually been put on pause for a month. And President Trump has given Mexico that amount of time to get their National Guard on the border, doing more to thwart the drug traffic into the United States. I wouldn't be surprised if

this deal has been worked out with Canada by the time that our listeners hear this interview, although that certainly is not the case as of this moment. What do we make of the tariff situation? On the face of it, it would seem that the U.S. importing, it has to import almost all of its uranium. It doesn't produce very much inside the United States. A lot of it

comes from Canada. Is this going to have a big impact if the Canadian tariffs stay in place and what will it mean?

Look, yeah, I mean, as you said, I mean, the one thing I was kind of hoping that all these global word predicting algo bots that push around these markets and indices, I was hoping that Trump 2.0, they'd dial their sensitivity meter down a little bit. Because as you said, you know, we're going headline to headline. And I mean, the good thing about Trump 2.0 is that this time,

the countries that are in the firing line are much better prepared for a response than last time. So the responses are coming within hours as opposed to Trump 1.0 when it was days or weeks as they all had to scramble. So who knows where this ends? As we've seen, he loves to throw the net out and really sort of put that threat out there that I'm going to enact it and then that causes the negotiating to happen.

When you look at uranium specifically in the United States, I mean, for the points earlier, you would think that you'd be trying to exempt Canadian uranium because of its strategically so important to the United States, especially given that Russia's off the cards and the Kazakhs seem to be pushing further and further away from the West and towards Russia and China, which means you've basically got the Uzbeks, a little bit of American and some

and Australian. But, I mean, again, the one great thing about nuclear power is that the fuel cost of generating nuclear power is very small as a total percentage of the operating cost because all of the cost has gone into building the things. And, you know, I think sort of uranium is sub 10% of the total fuel cost. Oh, sorry, the total cost when you add in the whole sort of fuel cycle, it's under $20 billion.

But so, you know, a tariff passed on to a US utility, it's not really going to... I mean, the press is saying, oh, the electricity price is going to go up next week. That's not true. Unless, of course, there's a utility really trying to push home a political angle. It's not going to, for example, you know...

The gas cost, the price of gas is 90% of the cost of gas generation. Coal, it's 80%. Nuclear, as I said, very, very small. And plus as well, the converted fuel coming in from Canada, all the yellow cake, again, it's not going to be anywhere near a nuclear power plant for a number of years now. So what we're burning in the US today was priced in 2022.

So, you know, the longer it goes on, obviously, the more uncertainty it will breed and potentially...

If you are a U.S. utility and you've got a list of non-Canadian and non-Russian uranium developers, you're probably wanting to push that up the priority list for your conversations because if you're not, somebody else is going to because, again, even a U.S. utility wants security of supply and wants to smooth out geopolitical risk and Canada's now geopolitical risk as a result of all this.

You mentioned that time lag and how long it takes between the production and getting to the actual nuclear reactor. This is something I've always been puzzled by about the way this market works. Maybe you can help me understand it. If I buy an automobile that runs on gasoline or petrol, as you call it in Australia, nobody expects me to go buy crude oil and then contract with somebody to refine it for me and contract with someone else to, you know,

deliver it to where I can get it. There's a market and there are refiners and producers that sell to me, you know, I go to a filling station and I buy some petrol.

Why do we have this model where the utilities buy their own yellow cake feedstock and contract with someone to do conversion and contract with someone else to do enrichment? Why isn't there just a nuclear fuel industry that sells EUP to utilities so they just buy fuel for their reactors from somebody who's in the business of selling it to them? It seems to me that that would concentrate...

the skill and knowledge of the market instead of having, as you said, the guy from the utility who's responsible, you know, for buying natural gas on the futures market is also the guy who's buying some yellow cake and then he's going to contract with somebody to convert it and somebody else to enrich it. Wouldn't those utilities be better off to just efficiently buy reactor fuel from a reactor fuel company that does all of that for them? Why doesn't the market work that way?

It's a good question. And I think it probably stems from the perspective of when civilian nuclear power was rolling out in all of these countries, they were state or government owned entities. Utilities were largely all public.

And so it was the state or the government, you know, basically that was doing that. Potentially, you know, now that it's deregulated and there's a lot more sort of private or publicly listed companies, nothing really changed there. I mean, you could argue that because of the radioactivity and the risks around security and everything else, that chain of custody and one entity from

yellow cake all the way through to fabricated fuel rods is easier to prosecute if something goes wrong, as opposed to 100 middlemen all running around with no security clearances saying, whoops-a-daisy, sorry, I lost some yellow cake along the road there. Don't worry about it. Maybe it was easier to regulate. I don't know the answer to that, but you're right. I mean, it's

It is kind of unique to nuclear how they do that. I mean, I guess, you know, car companies are sourcing metals to then put through as opposed to buying, you know, to try to hedge out that price.

Yeah, but you're right. It could be a little bit more efficient if there was somebody controlling that sort of whole process. But I mean, I guess also enrichment generally was always government owned and in many cases still is, whereas conversion was, you know, sort of Cameco does it, Arano does it, you know. So maybe again, there was that sort of that blurring between ownership. Now, somebody, I'm sure somebody out there would know the answer to that.

Let me hit you with another question because I know you've been trading commodities for a long time. Long before you got into uranium, you traded other commodities. As you know, the commodity futures market is what commodity traders have always favored. And once you have a deep and liquid commodity futures market, it's really powerful because the term structure of those markets give us things like forward curve analysis that really help us

to analyze what's happening with a commodity, what signals the market's giving us. It really makes a lot of sense. It's proven to work. Yet for some reason, although there is a uranium commodity futures contract, basically nobody uses it and it has no liquidity in it. What's the story there? Yeah, so that commodity futures contract was launched in the last cycle when you had a huge amount of...

financial players all wanting to get involved. I mean, it was still a small contract back then. There's no way it was ever going to be like a crude oil or anything like that. But yeah, it traded a lot more and there's a few more banks that were trading it. I mean, again, we're very early in the cycle. If anything, it's got harder now to trade physical uranium from compared to eight years ago when I first looked at doing it. And also I think

the players in the physical spot market, they don't want a futures contract because they're able to push this thing around $2 or $3 without trading to meet whatever short-term acts they have to grind. You know, as you said, a futures contract brings more transparency and more, it makes it,

harder to keep things manipulated. And I'm not for any moment saying these guys are doing bad things, but they're using the market to their advantage. It's quite possibly the worst commodity market I've ever seen. And I've traded some bad ones over my time. And that's because

it comes down to the same thing. The actual end user, you probably have to take off your shoes and socks to count them globally, but you don't need a second person to help you count them out. There's not many of them. So you end up with all of these traders in the middle, just churning stuff around until a utility, or as we've seen, you know, over the last few years, a producer comes in to buy things. So it's, it remains a dysfunctional market.

I mean, even if the futures contract was to pick up again, I still wouldn't place a huge amount of faith in what it does because 99% of the business goes on in the term market and that doesn't happen fast. It's a slow moving beast.

Let's talk about the longer term outlook. I think most of the credible analysts can understand we've got a major nuclear renaissance that's underway. It's going to lead to a massive demand for more uranium in future years. Where is it all going to come from? Where's the growth and supply going to come from? Well, one thing.

Third of the global supply of uranium reserves or resource, I should say, is in your country, Australia, except for one little problem, which is it's illegal to mine it there because because why again, because Jane Fonda was in a movie in the 1970s. I think that's the reason.

It seems like there might be hope, though. Nobody was listening to you. Nobody was listening to me. But now Miss America is touring over around Australia to sold out audiences who want to hear her talk about nuclear energy. So, Grace, fantastic job. Keep up the good work.

They're starting to listen, I think, in Australia. What if they opened up? Let's take the question a different way. What would it take to open up mining of uranium all across Australia where it's prohibited across most of the country right now? Is that something that the new national government, if Peter Dutton were to

If his party were to get in and take over the national government, can they at the stroke of a pen say, OK, we're opening up the whole country for uranium mining? Or is that something that happens at a state level where each state would have to pass its own opening of uranium mining through its own state legislature? So the very short answer is state governments control uranium mining policies.

So if or when Peter Dutton gets in to federal parliament, he's got a liberal party running Queensland. Although, as far as I'm aware, there's nobody with projects in Queensland who are lobbying that party to remove their moratorium. So that requires a vote in parliament. However, you would probably argue that there would be pressure from the federal government on its own party, state level there, to change things there.

South Australia would benefit probably almost immediately because they're the only state that has three operating uranium mines, being Olympic Dam, Beverly's, Heathgate's operations there, and obviously BOSS with Honeymoon. So they would benefit immediately, although it's not clear what other near-term production capabilities there are there. Northern Territory, you know, there's plenty of prospectivity, but that needs a lot of exploration.

The real elephant in the room is Western Australia. There's some good defined projects there. There is a Labor government in place. There is an election coming up there in March. It probably doesn't change colour in Western Australia. However, there's potentially an economic argument to make to the government and the trade unions

on the basis of the West has had mining job losses for the first time since the GFC because lithium, nickel, gold hasn't necessarily been employing too many people despite the Aussie gold price being at all-time highs and iron ore is automating. And so there's potential there where, and there are those companies that are lobbying

into the government and the trade unions saying, hey guys, get over the fact it's uranium. It's actually jobs and it's mining jobs. And if you really spin this the right way, we're exporting carbon neutral. So you can put that in your net equation and off you go. So a change in federal government will definitely push momentum. But yeah, things need to happen at a state level. New South Wales,

It's you can explore for uranium. You can't mine uranium, but there's nobody been claiming they found any. And Victoria, forget about it. How much uranium, how many metric tons of uranium does Australia produce with the few mines that are allowed to produce it today? And if you had a nationwide opening where everybody's allowed to mine uranium any place they want to in Australia, let's say within 10 years, what could that number grow to?

Yeah, so Olympic Dam does about 8 million pounds per year. It's unsure whether an Olympic Dam expansion would include a uranium circuit, you know, because the mining techniques on an expansion there would be slightly different. Potentially they leave the uranium behind and just take out the copper and gold.

You know, again, if you had a pro-nuclear uranium government and prices were the right way, it would be silly of PHP not to do that. BOS is obviously ramping up, so they'll get up to two and a half million pounds out with their bid air run rate. And then Heathgate, don't really disclose, but it's around sort of four million pounds. You know, if you suddenly had...

a change and you know it's not going to be an immediate things get switched on it's a it's a three to five to six year process probably but there's at least three projects in in Western Australia that would be able to respond there's probably one and definitely one in South Australia that would respond BOSS would obviously think about

bringing forward their expansion into their satellite deposits to get themselves up to about 3 million. So, you know, there's things that can happen, but unless you go and put Jabaluka back on the table, you're not solving deficits from a few extra projects in Australia coming on because, you know, they're a couple of million pounds at best each, whereas the market really needs some more sort of 10, 20 million pound monsters to properly solve the deficit.

Well, you've got a third of the world's uranium reserves under your soil. Why wouldn't you, if you opened up the rules, be able to build those 20 million pound kind of monsters? Well, you need to find them and you need to probably prove them out. We've had more than 20 years of very little activity, exploration activity and very little project development.

and even some of the projects that some of these companies are sitting on, they're still going to require a lot of work and a lot of capital to drill them out, to prove up their resource, to redo mine plans, to redo studies, to get environmental baseloads, studies and things like that. So there is absolutely a huge amount of potential, but it's going to take a lot of time and a lot of money to progress them properly. You know, unless...

we get a kind of bureaucratic change in the federal government where drill, baby, drill, or dig, baby, dig type of things. Let's move on now to a completely different topic. Most of the nuclear funds that I'm aware of are almost exclusively focused on uranium and the uranium fuel cycle, as we've been talking about. I think your fund is a little bit different in that you have expanded your

into nuclear innovation, nuclear technology generation for reactor companies and so forth. I shouldn't even assume that. You're expanding into other stuff besides uranium. So let me pose that as a question. What kind of stuff and why are you picking the things that you're picking? When I first looked at this sort of thesis eight to 10 years ago,

I work for a global natural resources business and mining is our specialty. So it would have been really easy to call ourselves a uranium mining fund. But when I was looking at, is there technology out there that's going to disrupt my demand thesis for uranium? Because it's important when you're thinking long-term for a product like this,

that's so specialized, you don't want to be, you don't want to be sort of, you know, caught out because fusion or something kicks in and suddenly you're dead in the water. So I did a lot of work on that. And what I came to understand was, yes, there are threats around making renewable sources more like baseload. Yes, there are, yes, there are threats to

solving long duration energy storage that's not just two to four hours, that's days, and also the capacity to charge that. And yes, there's technologies like fusion and discussions that we've had as well around thorium-based reactors as well. But there was also a demand driver in the middle of all that being small modular and advanced modular reactors.

where, you know, none of that technology is, as you know, none of that technology is new. There's been various governments looking at it since the Manhattan Project in the 1950s. It's just always been the problem of the demand has always been gigawatt scale and you could never make smaller scale work commercially. But, you know, we've seen

companies like Tesla where that first vehicle they put out was almost luxury car prices it's just eye-watering and now you can pick these things up for for the same as you can pick up an ice sedan somewhere so you know I think that was going to always going to be the big driver and so that's why we called it Nuclear Energy Opportunities Fund so last year when

When we started hearing about data centers and our mate Craig Scroggie over at Next DC, who we've both had interactions with over the times, guys like that started talking about that. That was when I started to flex up what we call a nuclear innovation exposure tag. And I think April, May last year was about 3% of the fund. It's been as much as 35, 40% of the fund since then because, you know, that was...

the sector that was in the nuclear thesis that was really going to be interesting to all those tech investors to maybe divert a few of their magnificent $7 into something slightly off-piste, very innovative with a tech angle to it, but also directly related to the nuclear and uranium thesis. So yeah, I mean, as I said, we've done very well out of that. Uranium's been

behaving just, I don't understand the behavior, but it's been terrible for the last six months. You know, some of these stocks are,

at just bargain basement prices and that but the nuclear innovation side has been a real savior for our performance since then because there's been a huge pool of capital running in and some of it doesn't make sense and you if you try to do it on valuations it's a real head scratcher but you just got to understand it's it's there's and you know and the problem is when you you see like deep

I always want to call it deep fake or deep hate, but at deep seek, when you see headlines like that, you can see how much speculative money is in this, in the way they sell off. But yeah, there's some interesting stories coming up and a lot more are being listed now. So I don't have to sit in private stuff like we would have three years ago. I've got a little bit more liquidity in that space.

So it sounds like your thesis is what are the tech bros going to get excited about because they're technology thinkers. It seems like most of them have a love affair that I don't quite understand with fast sodium reactors. Is that

the kind of area that you're investing in is in reactor technologies? I mean, there's also companies like Lightbridge that are doing interesting things with the fuel cycle. Are you following all those things? Is it mostly about the reactor technology? What kinds of nuclear innovation do you follow? Following all of them, all of them from, yeah, anything innovative around the fuel cycle,

to, you know, looking at medical isotopes, to looking at different technologies. The ones that are listed, obviously, are a little bit more of the traditional technologies. Most of the other stuff is still private. And, you know, I've looked at a lot of them and looked at opportunities to invest in a lot of them. But for me at the moment, having a liquid position where I can't get an exit necessarily is a trade-off

for what could my money be doing in some of these other opportunities, even though there's stories that I really, really like and really believe in,

For me, it's like if they were to have a liquidity event and list somewhere, I'd be falling over myself to get into some of them. But, you know, as I said, it's liquidity. As you know from your experience, liquidity is king when you're running funds, especially volatile ones. So there's a time and a place for liquid stuff, but I've been trying to minimize that at the moment.

Well, I couldn't agree more that most of the exciting nuclear technology is still private, and I fear it's going to stay that way. It seems like some of the best projects, you know, TerraPower is Bill Gates' personal little pet project. When you get to

to public listings of those things, they're already so well known and so well understood that you're paying up for it. You're not getting in on the ground floor. You don't have that opportunity to get in on the ground floor of anything nuclear in public markets, unfortunately.

Guy, I can't thank you enough for a terrific interview. But before I let you go, tell us a little bit more about Nuclear Energy Opportunity Fund. I assume it's only available to accredited investors. I think you call them wholesale investors in Australia. What's the structure of the fund? And for people who are qualified to invest in it, how can they contact you for a tear sheet? Yeah, thanks, Eric. So we're a global fund set up as an Aussie unit trust here in Australia.

It's open for wholesale investors. We run quarterly liquidity. And as you know, we're long short. So I do use some hedging strategies on occasion to try to cushion some of the drawdown. It's very focused. I mean, the reality is it is a long focused vehicle because of the investment thematic. And we invest in anything from explorers for uranium,

through to bright, shiny new technologies that are going to come in and take the world by storm on the nuclear generation front. We've been around for eight years now. I think the current returns are about 440% net of fees since inception. And I think it's a really interesting time in the sector because as I alluded to before, most of the uranium stocks are on sale.

due to just silliness around spot prices and short interest, especially here in the ASX. And it's just going to be a matter of time before the utilities wake up and realize that they need to play catch up. And this sector moves extraordinarily fast. Anybody that's looked at the price action can see that the drawdowns can be significant.

It can be a little bit painful, but you just have to trust the thesis and look to add to the quality names because when it moves, you can't trace it. It's just too fast. And I believe that we're set up for a good year. So as I said, if you're looking to have a discussion around investment in the fund, you can contact us by our website, www.tribecaip, which stands for investmentpartners.com.

And there'll be a little contact us button there in which you can come through. Patrick Ceresna and I will be back as Macro Voices continues right here at macrovoices.com. Now back to your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Ceresna.

Eric, it was great to have Guy back on the show. Now let's get to that chart deck. Listeners, you're going to find the download link for the postgame chart deck in your Research Roundup email. If you don't have a Research Roundup email, that means you have not yet registered at Macrovoices.com. Just go to our homepage, Macrovoices.com, and click on the button over Guy's picture saying looking for the downloads. Now, Eric, let's start off with your thoughts here on the equity markets.

Well, Patrick, I have a non-consensus take on the events of the last two weekends, and my conclusion is that this equity market is more fragile than most pundits have acknowledged. The last two weekends were market fragility warnings. DeepSeek was an advancement in AI technology. We're making progress here. They proved that model training costs could be brought down and made more economical than previously understood.

That's good news for AI, not bad news. What it means longer term is that the cost of training amortization is going to come down, making those $20 subscription models that were not profitable a little bit closer to profitable or maybe profitable for some of the people that are running them. That will ultimately increase, not decrease, inference demand, which will ultimately be much higher than training demand. So arguably, this should have been bullish for NVIDIA stock.

But the market completely panicked, fearing that it meant that the end of the world was coming. Now, that retracement happened by Monday afternoon or something. It was as we came to our senses and realized it was a panic. It all got forgotten. But the point is, the market was looking for an excuse to panic in the first place. Then this past weekend.

The only thing that Trump did on tariffs over the weekend was exactly precisely what he very clearly told everyone to expect the week before in plain English. The only news that happened over the weekend was those people who assumed that Trump was bluffing and would never actually sign those tariffs into effect got proven wrong.

China and Mexico both quickly capitulated, just as Trump intended. And the whole thing was once again over and done with and forgotten and retraced by Tuesday. So the question to ask yourself is, OK, if the market was ready to panic over the sky is falling over these relatively small events. Well, then what happens when we get some real news that really and truly is bearish and bearish in a persistent way?

And it's not like we don't have cause to worry that that might happen because the Trump administration is getting bolder and bolder in its policy actions, which means that news that really and truly is bearish and stays bearish for more than just a day or two could be on the near horizon.

So I think we should take these last two overreactions as a sign that the market is looking for a catalyst for a downside risk event. And as several of our guests have said, volatility is going to be the name of the game in the Trump 2.0 administration.

Well, Eric, I'll agree with that. Volatility is now here to stay. I want to look under the hood and size up what has really happened in the markets over the last couple of weeks. Clearly, it was earnings season. A lot of the MAG7s were a mixed bag. So we're going to have to look under the hood and size up what has really happened in the markets over the last couple of weeks.

We have some of them ripping to all-time highs and others struggling, including obviously NVIDIA and Apple and a few of these others that are pulling back off their highs. It's very hard for the indices to push to all-time new highs when you don't have clarity on these mega cap stocks that impact the index.

in terms of them being in a decisive bull trend. Even then, when you look at the breadth of the market, we have only about 50% of stocks in the S&P 500 actually trending. And so we have to have one of two scenarios really happen in order for the bull to continue, which is

either all of these MAG7s turn back up and begin trending or the breadth of the market has to widen so that there's a much wider participation driving that index higher. If the existing trend persists,

then you're going to have a market that is going to be very tired and heavy with the substantial overhead resistance, which often starts to resemble topping formations. So what will prevail? A market correction that breaks the 6,000 level on the downside and opens the window for some mean reversion of what was a pretty solid multi-month bull run on the upside or

Or is there enough gas in the tank for a lot of these to bullishly break out? I think you can break it down to looking at some of the key stocks like Tesla, Apple, and even Nvidia and see whether these stocks actually can bullishly turn back up after having been in a correction for a month or more.

And if these stocks can get their mojo back on the upside, then maybe there's room still for a breakout to a fresh high for an impulse maybe to 63 or 6400 on the upside. All right, Eric, what are your thoughts on the dollar here?

Well, we're still trading sideways in a consolidation pattern. A sustained move above 110 or below 107 on the Dixie will be the tell for what the next directional move is likely to be. So Eric, on page three, I have that U.S. dollar index chart and I'm trying to keep it super simple. I mean, we had this amazing bull run on the dollar from October into the new year and it broke out of a two-year trade range bullishly on the upside.

Now, we are over the last couple of weeks in a corrective pattern on the dollar where it's consolidating off of its highs. But we are still above the trade range that was established in the prior two years. It's still holding above its moving averages. And overall, the way I look at it is that eventually the dollar was going to take a pause and consolidate that bull run. But if we generally see old dips being bought,

and it's staying decisively, let's say, above 106, 107, then this could end up just being like a two, three week correction in the dollar that will ultimately prevail with a bull continuation pattern. I continue to stand on the side that the bulls are not done yet here and that there is room for there still to be another further advance.

All right, Eric, let's touch on oil. What are your thoughts? Well, we're back down to cycle lows and also clustered moving averages right around $71 on WTI. It's hard to make a directional call here with any kind of conviction because the news flow and particularly any uncertainty around the Trump administration policy in Gaza means, you know, who knows what's going to happen next.

Eric, on page four, I have that chart of crude oil and my position all along was just simply asking the question, was this just a short squeeze because everyone was piled on the shorts on oil going into December or is this the beginning of a new bull run? So we had this

$12 short squeeze to upside which is a similar magnitude of prior short squeezes that we saw back in October and the one we saw back in June and each time back then it faded right back down to the lows and so one of the things that I was looking for was whether or not the bulls would buy the dip and

and whether or not we saw a pattern of accumulation starting to develop, or was it simply a short covering squeeze and it would simply fall right back into its prior trade range?

Well, it's now been several weeks and it's clear at this moment that there's no sign of any buying. And unless the bulls can save this back up to $74, $75 a barrel in a very short window of time, like before our next episode, then you have to assume at this stage that oil's just back into its trade range. And that doesn't mean that there won't be a bottom here, but it means that

There is no new bull phase here underway, at least not yet. And so we'll be looking technically whether or not there's a turn point in its future. Now, let's touch on gold. What are your thoughts here? Well, the formative breakout to new all-time highs that we reported on last week's podcast is no longer formative. And once again, we're flashing extreme overbought on the RSI.

But breakouts can keep the market overbought for a long time. And there's still plenty of room on the chart above where we are now for higher numbers. Well, Eric, I have that chart of gold on page five. And, you know, we can see that decisive bull breakout out of the horizontal triangle formation that was there back in November. And so with this bull breakout, the measured move is up to 3000. So at this moment, gold is being very well accumulated.

pattern of higher highs, higher lows, every dip being bought is still persistent. There's definitely room for another $100 an ounce on the upside toward that big round number that has been talked about all last year.

Bigger question is once we reach these upper levels, is that going to become a resistance level or is simply gold going to consolidate and just keep plugging away in a big bull market all year? Let's take it one step at a time. Right now, about another $100 an ounce on the upside is where all the measured moves are. Let's see whether the bulls can finish these moves.

All right, Eric, let's move on to uranium. You had us share this chart that you talked about with Guy. What's on your mind? Patrick, I really think the key to this market is being told by the ocean wall chart, which we have in the postgame chart book and which I also discussed with Guy in the feature interview. Now, after today's interview with Guy, I've now asked just about every expert I know, both here on the podcast and also off the air for some of the other people that I know,

Nobody, including Guy Keller in today's interview, has a really solid narrative explanation for what caused the trend divergence between EUP and Yellow Cake that began right around the start of 2024.

AUP, that's the enriched nuclear reactor fuel, more than doubled in calendar year 2024, while UF6, that's the output from the conversion process, was flat and U-308, or Yellow Cake as it's known, was actually down on the year.

How is it possible that these things that are basically produced from one another are going in opposite directions? Now, of course, the bulls are very quick to say, well, this can only mean that uranium and uranium miners are about to explode to the upside any day now and catch up to EUP.

But that's a little naive. You could just as easily make the opposite argument that we have a clear trend divergence that's now a year old. So there's no reason to think that that trend divergence is going to reverse and reconverge until whatever caused that divergence to occur in the first place is reversed on a fundamental level.

Now, Patrick, I have a hunch that this is being driven by some combination of conversion and enrichment bottlenecks and U.S.-Russia foreign policy deterioration. But like I said, that's a hunch, not a solid narrative that's based on sound fundamental analysis.

I'm still on the hunt for a clear and concise explanation of what caused this divergence to occur in the first place. Yellowcake and the miners have to eventually turn up to reconverge with EUP. But why?

when that reconvergence is going to happen is a question that I don't think can credibly be answered until you first establish why the divergence occurred in the first place. And of course, that began from early 2024. So I, for one, don't have that answer. Still trying to find it. If I can get a solid one that I believe in, we'll get them on the podcast.

Well, Eric, you're exactly right. The U-308 simply has not gotten a pulse yet. It continues to be in a deep sideways consolidation, but we'll look for where the technical breakout points start to emerge. But right now it's not visible.

Finally, Eric, I wanted to just touch on the copper chart. On page seven, I have that descending trend line that's really encompassed the entire 2024 market correction. So now that copper here is trying to turn up. You can see it's holding above its 50-day moving average, breaking out that descending trend line, asking the very big question, is the copper going to start a new bull advance?

And that's certainly something that we're going to continue to watch whether or not the bulls can follow through. But certainly our listeners can pay attention to see whether or not something is underway here. Folks, if you enjoy Patrick's chart decks, you can get them every single day of the week with a free trial of Big Picture Trading. The details are on the last pages of the slide deck or just go to bigpicturetrading.com. Patrick, tell them what they can expect to find in this week's Research Roundup.

Well, in this week's Research Roundup, you're going to find the transcript for today's interview as well as the chart book we just discussed here in the postgame, including a link to a number of articles that we found interesting. You're going to find this link and so much more in this week's Research Roundup. That does it for this week's episode. We appreciate all the feedback and support we get from our listeners, and we're always looking for suggestions on how we can make the program even better. Now, for those of our listeners that write or blog about the markets and would like to share that content with our listeners,

send us an email at researchroundupatmacrovoices.com and we will consider it for our weekly distributions. If you have not already, follow our main account on X at Macro Voices for all the most recent updates and releases. You can also follow Eric on X at Eric S. Townsend. That's Eric spelled with a K. And you can also follow me at Patrick Ceresna on behalf of Eric Townsend and myself. Thank you for listening and we'll see you all next week.

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