Perhaps my most speculative holding is Centrus Energy (AMEX: LEU). I wrote about their predecessor back in 2013 (they went through a recapitalization and name change) and have been keeping track of them ever since.
I won’t get into the investing thesis (or valuation) but LEU is a uranium processor for nuclear fuel. They originally took nuclear missile warheads and reprocessed their uranium cores into fuel for nuclear power plants, but now they obtain their raw material through Russian and French sources.
However, given the current hype on anything nuclear-related, and especially considering that LEU is one of the few publicly traded companies that are into such businesses, over the past couple months they have received obvious retail activity:
We look at the chart and see a stock that has more than doubled, but also with a serious amount of stock volume (after the secondary offering, there is a float of about 11.3 million shares). Examining the social media, we see that there is clear retail activity.
During these periods of retail mania there are extreme ups and extreme downs. You see this in any stocks that were relatively inactive but then gain a mass following – the daytraders, speculators and short-term technical traders dive in, and then it causes intensive volatility when they jointly decide to buy and sell. These ups and downs are very difficult (if not impossible) to time, but this is where you get people on Youtube making daytrading videos as they scale in and out of such positions.
Sometimes it is right to bail out in these situations, and sometimes you just have to hold on for dear life and get used to the notion of seeing a position in your portfolio gravitate 10% a day. I guess we’re all Bitcoin holders these days, even when we’re not holding them.
I think the same is happening to GRN.V