Title: Uranium long term price makes all time high. Bull market intact. AIA Weekly Report 7.4.26 Show: John Polomny — Actionable Intelligence Advisors (AIA) Weekly Market Update (YouTube) Guest: John Polomny (founder, Actionable Intelligence Advisors; runs the AIA Portfolio + Actionable Intelligence Alert newsletter) Date: 2026-07-04 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR0H5mI8fIk Length: ~33 min Note: Auto-captured YouTube transcript, (mm:ss) cues preserved; verbal filler to be trimmed in processing, wording otherwise verbatim. Auto-transcript garbles to map to the right entity in analysis: "John Pauly"=John Polomny; "ARCG"=ARKG (ARK Genomic Revolution biotech ETF); "theou"/"the MOU"=the 60-day memorandum of understanding; "Straight of Hormu('s)"/"Hormu"=Strait of Hormuz; "Arano"=Orano; "Kamako"=Cameco; "Mlan Lake"=McClean Lake mill; "Cala"/Malawi mine=Lotus's Kayelekera; "Ellay"/"Malay"=Milei; "Eco Petrol"=Ecopetrol (EC); "Geop Park"=GeoPark (GPRK); "Perrick"=Parex Resources; "Teladine"=Teledyne; "Freed Freriedeland"=Robert Friedland (Ivanhoe Metals); "canon/counton effect"=Cantillon effect.
00:02 Guys, John Pauly here, Actionable Intelligence. Today is Saturday, July 4th, and this is the weekly market update. The disclaimer, anything that you hear or see on this podcast or video is not to be taken as investment advice. I am not a registered financial advisor and I cannot give you personalized investment advice.
00:26 Please do your own due diligence. It's your money. It's your responsibility. Okay. Well, it's 4th of July, 250 years of the American experiment. We'll see if it continues. But yeah, be safe out there with the fireworks. Don't blow your fingers off. Let's get into this week's info. So, this is from Robert Schiller and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
00:56 Basically price to sales are the highest they've ever been. One of the things I'm coming around to noticing is some people have described this kind of situation. I think we may be in project Zimbabwe. I think Raoul Paul, that guy that has that, he was that Bitcoin guy, he kind of had a thing on Twitter this week talking about how correlated liquidity is to basically the NASDAQ and this can probably help explain a lot of the increase in stocks and asset prices.
01:38 Again, I mean, I've said this before, in the short and medium-term, liquidity and sentiment drives stock prices. And he showed a correlation he said was something like 97%. And so, we have all of the basically, well, it goes in cycles. Obviously, they don't keep their foot on the gas pedal all the time, but money printing is now what the western democracies are wedded to because of the indebtedness.
02:09 We've talked about this before. I'm not going to get into it deeply here, but in my view, this is one of the things that's kept this floor under the stock market and kept the valuation metrics so high. It's just a constant amount of new money coming in. And a lot of this is because, as I've said many times before, we are so indebted that money creation has to continue.
02:37 And you know, the Cantillon effect, you don't know exactly where all that created money is going to go. And so when the Federal Reserve just creates dollars out of thin air and the New York Fed buys treasuries, people that receive those dollars have to do something with them.
02:57 And typically what they do is they put it into various asset classes. And so that's why you see various asset classes get expensive. They constantly have this fuel of increased liquidity. And so yes, there's pullbacks here and there. There's areas like we see pullbacks in commodities, pullbacks of the stock market, but we see this trend where we have these historic overvaluations that can't be explained or people like when is this going to break? And the suggestion is well as long as the money printing continues, will it break? Are we
03:34 at a permanent plateau of higher valuations that break the historical narrative? For example, we don't see these price to sales ratios on the S&P except for since basically 2008 when we had the great financial crisis which initiated this big liftoff in money printing, with the federal government now running basically six to 7% GDP deficits and close to $2 trillion a year deficits.
04:12 It's a large part of the economy and a lot of liquidity is flowing into the economy and into markets and so this can explain a lot of what we are seeing. My view is that you have to own hard assets. You want to own things that the Federal Reserve and the government can't create out of thin air, that they can't create by fiat.
04:38 So as the supply of dollars and yen and euros and all the other paper confetti increases in number, they can't — that doesn't translate directly into more oil or more gold or more uranium. And so these things have a natural demand to them and have their own fundamental dynamics but have upward pressure being placed on the fact that they're being priced in depreciating currencies.
05:07 So I think something to consider — why we have these persistent overvaluation metrics that have gone on for years and people are scratching their head going why have we not had this big correction? Well, it's because every time that you have a correction, first of all, you have a constant flow of money and the Cantillon effect have created money flowing into the markets.
05:29 And when there's any kind of crisis or disinflationary impulse in the economy, bad debts or a blow up at certain sectors of the economy, whether it's the banking sector, insurance sector, what have you, the government and the Federal Reserve comes in and patches the hole with printed money. So, it's something to consider.
05:52 I talked about biotech in my last video. I've taken positions. I probably might take individual stock positions inside the portfolio. We have a drug company. It's not necessarily a biotech, but we do have a drug company that's one of the best performers in the portfolio. But I've taken a position in the ARKG biotech fund.
06:21 If you look at the technicals of a lot of the biotech indices, they've either bottomed or has broken higher on the charts. And I do not pretend to be an expert on biotechnology stocks. This is a field in of itself that requires a lot of expertise. But I do see a chart pattern that I like and so with the advent of ETFs and such it is possible to take a starter position and look at some of these companies and see if there's a potential with the advent of AI and computing that we're getting into.
07:03 I've read several pieces and listened to some podcasts, people that are in the know that this should spill over into the biotech industry and the drug discovery industry. We will see what happens but I think there's a potential here for a market that's been out of favor.
07:23 Starting to see based on this slide that I'm showing you, global biotech fund flow has increased 73% year-over-year from 2025 to 2026. I think this requires one to pay attention. We have capital now flowing into this sector. Okay, as I've said before, you can look at different indices or ETFs and they look to either be bottoming or breaking to the upside after many, many years of being in decline and out of favor.
07:57 This is classical setup for what I'm looking at. So, again, I'm not going to be an expert in biotech. What I have tried to find are the people that are experts and kind of listen to what they're saying. But I like the chart pattern and I'm taking some starter positions in some of the ETFs.
08:17 I think there's going to be a potential for the possibility of this sector outperforming over the next couple years. I will say one of the analysts said, one of the biotech guys I was listening to, that you don't typically have a bull market in tech without biotech at some point participating.
08:48 And so, like I said, it's been out of favor for probably seven, eight years, something like that, depending on what chart you look at. And it's classically bottomed and now breaking higher. So, I think it's something that you can look at. You know, people ask me like, "What am I looking at?" That's something I'm looking at.
09:06 I'm looking at regional banks in the US, small community banks. These things are all over the place. They're cheap. Some of them are run by the founders. They're getting old now. The amount of banks in the United States is consolidating year after year, and they're usually pretty decent.
09:27 This is another thing that nobody really looks at. So those are two sectors that I'm currently looking at that are kind of out of favor in addition to what I've talked about before — Latin America and Central Asia. So we've had this MOU in effect and basically this is a chart. This shows the Strait of Hormuz daily number of transients out of the Middle East.
09:56 Gulf, seen a big spike in traffic. Kind of a chicken run, prison break, if you will, however you want to describe it, of ships trying to get out of there while they can. Again, this has resulted in tens of millions of barrels entering the world market. I think one analyst described it as a sugar rush.
10:21 Will it stick? We've had all this supply come out, prices have come down, but when I look at the current status of the negotiations of the MOU, I think this was a political situation, a calculation by the Trump administration — they had to get oil prices down, they want to get it off the headlines, and so this is what they've done. They're allowing oil to flow, they've taken some of the sanctions off Iran, they're being able to sell their oil.
10:52 So, same thing during the Ukraine-Russia war where they took temporary sanctions off Russia. I mean, this is just like political manipulation. So, I don't when I look at the players, Israel and Iran, I don't see a lasting peace here until one of them is no longer relevant. This is kind of like I've described before.
11:14 I think this whole Kabuki theater, this WWF diplomacy is nothing more than a Minsk agreement. It's a period of turning the temperature down in the war. It's ongoing war that's been going on for decades against Iran, or between Iran and Israel with the United States participating on Israel's side. This is a way to get the heat down and replenish armaments and prepare for round two, similar to what happened with the Minsk agreement with Russia and Ukraine.
11:51 So again we don't know the future. It's impossible to predict what's going to happen but I would suggest that, again, everybody's done a prison break. How many tankers are coming back? So that we can drain all of that full storage and then turn production back on.
12:14 And so this is from Rory Johnson, I think his X — this kind of shows Middle East Gulf loadings as of July 2nd. It's interesting to see this line here, gray lines, the amount of tankers entering, empty tankers, but these are the actual crude loadings. This is prewar you see was like 20 million barrels a day.
12:44 We're back to around between 6 and 7 million barrels a day. Obviously we have to take into account that there's crude flowing from the east-west pipeline in Saudi Arabia, the crude pipeline across Oman. So tankers are entering, tankers are loading, crude is flowing, and so we're far from normalization. Again, it's going to be like a period of time to see how things normalize, to see how things pan out.
13:17 It was a 60-day memorandum of understanding. And if I go back to the fact that I'm quite sure that the Iranians are not foolish enough to believe that the United States is going to actually negotiate in good faith or allow the bullet points in the MOU to actually come to fruition. It's not going to be a $300 billion investment fund.
13:42 The United States and the Gulf countries are not going to agree to a tolling arrangement through the Gulf. These are all things on a piece of paper. This is to get crude into the world market and get prices down before the US midterms. And I have no doubt to rearm and get ready for round two after the midterms or in the next administration.
14:04 That's what this is about. This is not over by any stretch of the imagination. So again, this is just the facts. As of July 2nd, ships are going back in. Ships are loading and you can see the different countries where they're loading at. A lot of it is in Iran and UAE. Saudi is starting to pick up, but Iraq and Kuwait are really not back to where they were. Iraq is interesting.
14:43 In particular along with Kuwait, the countries are not anywhere near back to where they were before, or Saudi, but again Saudi has the east-west pipeline so something to monitor as we go forward. Going back to this, the other thing is there's been a lot of discussion, I think it's been fleshed out around Chinese not doing imports, Chinese staying out of the market, Chinese refined products not hitting the market, not importing the oil. At some point they will reenter the market, and so again another plate in the air we
15:22 don't know how that's going to coincide. The Chinese have been particularly shrewd in managing this and basically if it wasn't for them shutting down their imports and taking that demand off the world stage during the meaty part of the conflict, we probably would have had $150 oil, but that didn't happen.
15:48 Okay, so we will see what happens. At some point, they will reenter the market. But as of now, that has not happened. So, I wanted to talk about — they reported, it was reported out, the June long-term price for uranium, the term price, $95.50 a pound, the highest term price ever. The bull market continues slowly but surely inching up month after month.
16:17 Again, not much to be said, a lot of bullishness, a lot of bullish news. Demand continuing to increase and supply again constrained. So, here's a tweet by John Quakes. Uranium supply woes continue to pile up as Orano shuts down world's largest uranium mill at McClean Lake. Cameco shuts down the world's largest uranium mine at Cigar Lake.
16:48 Last week, Lotus indefinitely shut down its Kayelekera uranium mine in Malawi. All three shutdowns are due to sulfuric acid shortages stemming from acid plant breakdowns and supply chain issues. And so we're in the middle of a bull market in uranium, an undersupplied uranium market. And again, the supply woes continue in the market.
17:13 Again, where are those billions of dollars in new mine construction? They're not there yet. Okay. Yet demand continues to increase. I think another Chinese reactor went critical this week. There's an announcement of some of these SMRs I believe in Idaho going critical or something like that. So things are picking up steam, right? More and more things are happening on the demand side.
17:40 Supply again is where it is and so we just continue higher. We just continue to grind higher over time. The sulfur prices — this is primarily due to the closing of the Gulf because of the refining in the Gulf that was refining heavy crude. When you have a lot of sulfur in your crude, you have sulfur units, desulfurization units.
18:07 Byproduct being these mountains of sulfur that you've seen that's used as the raw material to create sulfuric acid. Because of the fact that exports of that sulfur have been limited because of the military action in the Gulf, we have a sulfuric acid shortage. And so now it's starting to permeate and affect even uranium production all over the world.
18:34 We know that for example one of the portfolio companies is a large copper miner in Africa and it has a smelter and one of the byproducts of the smelter is sulfuric acid, and this particular company is selling its sulfuric acid to other companies that don't have it, that need it for their processing, and was making somewhere upwards of a million dollars a day in revenue just from sulfuric acid sales.
19:00 So, this is a problem. You see that the price spiked in June a little bit above 11,000. It's pulled back to around the 9,000 level, but this is almost more than doubled, two and a half times, almost tripled since the beginning of the hostilities in the Gulf. So this is still having effects down the line.
19:23 This has an effect on phosphate fertilizers, the processing of phosphate into various phosphate fertilizer product. So we have a lot of these knock-on effects that have not resolved yet. Another John Quakes tweet — we talked about the spot price and the long-term price for uranium but also North American conversion prices are now at all-time highs.
19:56 Long-term price at $55.50 and spot at 64. Enrichment SWU long-term price is up $4 to a new all-time high of $180 and spot is 200. So all across the uranium supply chain you have all new all-time highs in these different segments of the uranium market. So yes, we are in a bull market that will continue until the necessary investments are made.
20:28 Now they are being made in different places along the supply chain around enrichment and conversion. We know that. Whether they'll be sufficient, I don't know. But again, new greenfield big uranium mines, where are they? Okay. When are they going to be built? When are they going to be permitted? Who's going to build them? Where's the capital coming from? So this is Toby Costa.
20:58 This is kind of echoing what Robert Friedland said vis-a-vis copper. I think this is pretty on point regardless of what happens with the AI buildout. But this is something that Robert Friedland has said many times, the CEO of Ivanhoe Metals — he said this: we must mine as much copper in the next 25 years as in all of human history.
21:29 So you see 700 million tons has been mined for the last 10,000 years to 2025 and the copper required over the next 25 years just at 3 to 3.5% world GDP growth, you need another 700 million tons. Okay. And that figure excludes electrification entirely. Add EVs, grids, and AI. And the University of Michigan models 1.1 billion tons by 2050 against 23 million of annual mine supply.
22:05 And I've reported ongoing issues like in Chile. I've reported other issues around the world with lower grades, more difficult to mine, and more politically dangerous areas. This is the setup for a long-term bull market. Okay? And talking about Milei — you will recall for the last couple years since Milei got elected in Argentina, we've seen a drift.
22:39 We've seen a movement away from left-wing politics in South America across the board to center right to right-wing politics. Now, does this necessarily translate into higher stock prices in these countries? Well, I haven't done the research, but what I would say is that when you move from left-wing economic policy to right-wing economic policy, that typically can have positive effect on your economy and allow for a rerating of stock market in that particular economy.
23:14 It doesn't happen instantaneously. Although we have seen as these elections, as these dominoes have fallen, we have seen many of these markets in these countries because they were so beaten down that they have rallied in anticipation of a change in government. Okay? And we see it — here's 2022. You can see in the red indicating left-wing governments.
23:39 Just four years ago, just about every country in South America had a left-wing government except for Paraguay. Okay? And just in the space of four years, just election after election, you have basically the whole Pacific coast of South America, just about all the countries in South America except for Brazil and Venezuela.
24:02 Although I say kind of Venezuela is kind of becoming like a US protectorate. It's adopting more and more market-based rules and laws because the US has its heavy hand on it. But we have an upcoming election in Brazil in October. I see that Lula — these polls are going to vacillate but it's kind of neck and neck and so it'll be interesting to see what happens in these countries as right-wing governments become ensconced and start applying more market friendly reforms,
24:47 more market friendly laws to their economies and if that has an effect on increasing economic growth. I find it interesting that in Colombia, for example, the right-wing candidate was elected, one of the first things he's decreed he's going to do when he takes power is replace the management and board of directors at Ecopetrol.
25:13 One of the things that the previous president did was basically stifle investment in new oil and gas exploration and production in Colombia to the point that Colombia now has declining reserves, okay, of petroleum and petroleum products. And so the hope is that changing out the board and changing out the management to people that are more conducive to exploiting the country's resources.
25:56 Is it a buy? I don't know. There's probably other companies there like GeoPark, I think, is one. Parex is another one that you might want to look at. These are independent operators but they are going to be partnering — they have partnered in the past and will continue to partner with Ecopetrol, I think.
26:17 So these things take time to get going but they will and hopefully we'll see the potential for a positive outcome. But I just think this is fascinating to watch how fast things have changed across South America. I think this is something that can be a decade-long trend and I think it's happening just as we start to see an inflection in the relative performance of Latin American stocks versus US stocks.
26:46 You know we have this historic overvaluation in US stocks. But relatively speaking South America, Latin American stocks are relatively cheap. This is why I've been banging the drum on these stocks with the thesis, with the view that well, if we get the political change that we can positively affect these economies that could translate into higher stock prices, and the political change is happening and it happened and is happening and economies are already turning around.
27:20 I mean, there's been tremendous change in Argentina. Okay. And I know that in Chile there's a tremendous amount, a lot of laws trying to be changed right now to get taxation and other things changed. Again, is there corruption in Latin America? Yes. Are these places Jeffersonian democracies? No.
27:45 Are things volatile politically and economically? Yes. But I think that what we've seen in the past is these things go in cycles. You can see from this chart going back to the 1980s that there'll be 10-year periods where they will outperform the US and then they will go into a 10 year bear market relative to the US and then rinse and repeat.
28:10 And I think that we are now in a situation where the US has outperformed for almost 20 years and we can see Latin American stocks because of the political environment is conducive to better economic outcomes. We really have a chance for that to affect and change the perception and valuation of those stock markets.
28:40 I wanted to point this out. This El Nino thing — you should, there's YouTube videos, I'm not going to get into it on here because it's a long subject, but pay attention to this El Nino, what's happening and how it's affecting — we have this super El Nino possibly happening in conjunction with fertilizer not being applied, fertilizer prices and diesel prices being high during the planting season.
29:07 Ergo less wheat production. USDA came out last week and said it's projecting US farmers will harvest just 32.1 million acres of wheat. You say, "Okay, so what's that mean?" Well, that's the fewest wheat acres in 149 years. That's crazy. Now, are yields way higher than they were in 1877? Absolutely.
29:35 But again, fields not planted. Again, wheat is something that's all over the whole world. Okay. And this is a phenomenon with this possibility of the high heat that's happening in Europe right now and a lot of its grain growing regions, the ongoing war in Ukraine that's disrupted agriculture, this high diesel and fertilizer prices.
30:04 So a lot of things could possibly be conspiring with this El Nino, which could be historic, to cause agricultural prices to move higher later on in this year and into 2027. So again, just another data point, no guarantee, but this is why I'm a little bit bullish on why I think food prices are going to be moving higher later on this year and into 2027.
30:34 Okay, guys. Short but sweet this week. That's it. The new issue of the Actionable Intelligence Alert newsletter is out. I'm adding a new company to the Actionable Intelligence Alert newsletter. I've become fond — I've been studying and have become fond of what are called cannibal stocks.
30:56 Companies that have historically bought back their stock over time. I use the point of Henry Singleton and Teledyne Corporation in the 60s and 70s and how he was an excellent capital allocator and bought back, I think over that period, something like 90% of Teledyne stock and it really outperformed the market.
31:22 It wasn't the only reason, but it was a big portion of it. And I've identified another management team that's taken over a company that I used to be familiar with five or six years ago and is running a similar playbook. Yes, they're not building a conglomerate and they're not using an overpriced stock to buy undervalued companies.
31:41 What they are doing is they've taken a company that was in some trouble. They sold off some assets. They paid down debt and have a cash pool now. And so what their intent is, they've identified over 5,000 undervalued publicly traded companies around the world in many places like the UK, and their plan is to buy these companies that generate cash and have cash on the balance sheets, bring them into the fold, use the cash on the balance sheets and their cash generating capability and then
32:17 rinse and repeat. And you might say to yourself, well, okay, what's so unique about that? Well, it's interesting because they have created with a very large Saudi Arabian family office, one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia that's not part of the royal family, a permanent capital vehicle that you can participate in that's currently undervalued.
32:40 And this particular management team has done this before. Okay? They already ran a capital fund that was private and have done this many times before. And so I think it's very interesting. And what did they do immediately after they paid down debt? They started buying back shares of their company already.
32:56 And so I kind of like that whole methodology. You can look at, for example, if you want an example of how this could work, look at the performance of AutoZone over the last 20 or 30 years. That company has consistently been cannibalizing its outstanding stock and buying back stock over time and it has really contributed to help — it's a good business okay to begin with but notwithstanding that the constant buybacks have helped propel the shares over the years and contributed to market outperformance.
33:32 So, if that's something you're interested in, we're not just all about resources and commodities here. We go anywhere to make money. If something's cheap, if something can make us money, we will go there. Okay, guys. That's it for this week. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you for watching and have a good holiday and a good week.