Student News
Undergrad Student Covers the Uranium Market
Matthew B. Smith, a
20-year-old junior at the Moore School of Business, learned his ABC’s a decade and a half ago by
watching the stock market ticker that crawled across the television screen each evening as his
father, a real estate lawyer, tuned in to the business channel.
Now the younger Smith, a native of Columbia, South Carolina, has a Web site, www.theinvestar.com, which covers the uranium market and provides profiles of uranium companies worldwide. His small research business, theinvestar.com, LLC, is also turning a profit as he helps interested investors worldwide get pertinent, updated information about the uranium market via a regular newsletter and online research and analysis. (His tag line: “helping ordinary investors achieve stellar returns.”)
Why uranium? “I think it’s the best idea out there for investing right now,” says Smith, who is majoring in finance and accounting and expects to graduate in Spring 2009. With global warming concerns putting the squeeze on most proposed new coal-burning power plants, and with solar and wind power, along with ethanol, still in their early stages as alternative energy sources, Smith points to an increasing interest today in nuclear power plants, which need uranium to function. (Over the next two years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects applications to build as many as 32 new nuclear reactors, according to The Washington Post. This would represent a possible investment by the U.S. power industry of an estimated $60 to $90 billion.)
On Mondays through Fridays, Smith rises at 6 a.m. to do Web research on the uranium news of the day, which he then uploads onto his Web site. When first launched in 2005, the site had about 500 visitors a month; earlier this year, it reached 10,000 visitors a month. Most of his Web site visitors are from Canada, Sweden, and the United States.
Smith is an investor himself in uranium companies and other equities. He began investing in the stock market as a third grader (with his father’s help), buying stocks with money earned by doing chores and saving dollars received as birthday gifts. When he was in fifth grade, Smith made his first independent stock-purchase decision, buying several shares of Intel.
Smith tells readers of his Web site that he has “been researching the stock markets and individual companies since 1997, but only recently opened our information to the public. We were in on the ground floor on the oil boom in 1999, right on time for the tar sands in 2005, and expect to be correct on our last big call made at the end of 2005 in uranium. Over the past year our portfolios have returned over 75%!”
Some day, Smith would like to run a hedge fund. “I like Columbia and kind of want to stay here,” he says, although he acknowledges that most hedge funds are operated out of the Northeast and West Coast.
In any case, he knows that he will be involved in the stock market in some fashion once his college days are over. “I always laughed at kids in college who invented things or started companies,” Smith says. “Then it happened to me.”
Jan Collins
October 2007