Uranium ETFs Slide 30% From Highs as U.S. Output Posts Biggest Gain in a Decade
Physical uranium prices hit an 18-year high while mining equities sink, exposing a widening gap between commodity fundamentals and equity returns.
The Global X Uranium ETF (URA) traded at $45.91 on Friday (2026-09-04). That was fractionally higher on the day, but still near levels roughly 30% below the ETF's recent peak — a decline documented by mid-August (2026-08-18), even as U.S. uranium production posted its sharpest annual increase in nearly a decade.5
The Energy Information Administration numbers are unambiguous. Output more than tripled in 2025 to 2.1 million pounds of uranium oxide (U3O8), a 223% increase over 2024 totals, the EIA reported in late June (2026-06-22). The last comparable production figure was 2016, when domestic sites mined 2.5 million pounds.2 Exploration drilling climbed nearly 66% to just over one million feet across 1,824 holes, some 500 more than were drilled in 2024.2 By most measures, U.S. uranium production is recovering. Equity markets have not followed.
The long-term uranium contract price hit $94 per pound at end-June (2026-06-30), its highest in 18 years, according to Sprott Asset Management. The uranium spot price added 4.3% during the first half of 2026.3 Yet uranium mining equities fell 3.9% over the same period. Junior miners lost 7.4%. In June (2026-06) alone, the two major uranium equity indexes dropped 14.4% and 17.5%, respectively.3
Uranium Energy Corp. (UEC) illustrates the problem at company level. The producer posted a net loss of US$52.34 million in its fiscal third quarter with zero revenue, even as it produced 32,195 pounds of uranium concentrate and commissioned the Burke Hollow mine in South Texas.1 The stock fell 24.8% after that June (2026-06-12) report. UEC is accumulating inventory — it held 1.46 million pounds of uranium in reserve at quarter-end — and none of that has become a sale.4
The bull case demands a significant ramp. Analysts project UEC reaching $352.2 million in revenue and $120.8 million in earnings by 2028, implying 92% annual revenue growth and a swing from current losses of around $77.8 million.1 Before the third-quarter miss, the most optimistic forecasters put 2029 revenue at as high as US$607 million, a figure that rested on unhedged spot price exposure and aggressive multi-hub in-situ recovery expansion.1 Those projections were already stretched before the equity selloff.
The policy backdrop has not shifted against uranium. The U.S. Department of Energy announced $17.5 billion in conditional loans in June (2026-06) to fund long-lead components for as many as 10 new reactors.3 AI-driven data center demand is forecast to reach 12% of total U.S. electricity consumption by 2028, adding pressure on baseload generation capacity.5 On paper, nuclear baseload wins from both.
Sprott argues the equity selloff is a mispricing. The firm's physical uranium trust holds 81.4 million pounds of uranium oxide with a net asset value of around $7.1 billion. Jacob White, ETF product manager at Sprott, wrote in July (2026-07) that "a rising long-term price shows that the market remains tight, even if equity markets don't reflect it."3 The physical and equity markets are reading the same supply data differently.
But a physical trust and a mining equity are different instruments. A trust that holds pounds benefits directly when the spot price rises. A miner with inventory and no signed sales contracts captures nothing from that move in the near term. Equity investors pricing UEC are not discounting the uranium market in general; they are discounting cash generation specifically, and right now there is none.1,3
Whether producers can sign offtake agreements near the $94 long-term benchmark, rather than continuing to build pound inventories against a future that may or may not arrive on schedule, is the concrete signal the sector needs before the equity-commodity gap begins to narrow.1,3