Trade Alert: The Nuclear Boom
Bullish bets on two overlooked beneficiaries.
The Coming Nuclear Boom’s Overlooked Beneficiaries
Why Friday’s executive orders matter
With a few strokes of his magic marker last Friday, President Trump did three things nuclear energy supporters have been waiting on for years:
Cut the red tape. New small‑modular reactors (SMRs) built on federal land can now skip the full NEPA gauntlet and use a categorical exclusion instead of a multi‑year environmental impact statement.
Opened the fuel spigot. The Department of Energy was ordered to release stockpiled high‑assay low‑enriched uranium (HALEU) and fast‑track private fuel‑cycle projects on federal sites.
Declared AI data centers and critical‑manufacturing bases “national‑security loads.” That means reactors that keep fabs and server farms powered will jump to the front of the interconnection queue.
Wall Street’s knee‑jerk reaction was to bid up the same headline‑grabbing tickers—names like Oklo (OKLO 0.00%↑) that we opened a trade on last December.
Oklo was up more than 23% on Friday, and is up another ~10% so far today.
The Two Companies Hiding In Plain Sight
While the retail crowd chased micro‑cap reactor developers, the real picks‑and‑shovels winners barely budged by comparison. We’ll call them Company A and Company B for now: Company A was flat on Friday, and Company B was up about 3%. They both score highly on Chartmill’s ratings of health and profitability:
Company A:
Health: 7
Profitability: 8
Company B:
Health: 8
Profitability: 9
Company A manufactures the medium‑ and low‑voltage switchgear—and the pre‑fabricated power houses that wrap around that gear—that every SMR, micro‑reactor, and high‑density data‑center connection will need. Its record backlog, zero net‑debt balance sheet, and sterling 7‑Health / 8‑Profitability score tell you it can fund growth internally and still throw off cash.
Company B is the quiet supplier behind the pumps, valves, and control‑rod drive mechanisms certified on Westinghouse reactor designs. Every AP1000 retrofit, every future AP300 SMR, and the lion’s share of life‑extension projects flow through its nuclear segment—yet the stock still trades like a sleepy industrial conglomerate. With an 8‑Health / 9‑Profitability profile, it’s built to withstand the long project cycles that scare off lesser suppliers.
We have an options trade on one of these, and on the other we’re just buying the stock, because the options prices aren’t attractive. The maximum upside on our options trade is about 230%, and the maximum upside on our stock purchase is of course uncapped. The max loss on both is 100%, though that’s much less likely to happen with the stock.
Details below.
Our Company A Trade
The stock, a familiar name to longer-term subscribers, is Powell Industries (POWL 0.00%↑), and our trade is a vertical spread expiring on August 15th, buying the $200 strike calls and selling the $220 strike calls, for a net debit of $6. The max gain on 1 contract is $1,400, the max loss is $600, and the break even is with POWL at $206. This trade filled at $6.
Our Company B Trade
The stock is Curtiss Wright (CW 0.00%↑), and the options on this one are expensive, so our trade is just to buy the stock at limit of $445. This trade filled at $445.
Exiting These Trades
For POWL: a GTC order to exit the spread at a net credit of $19.75, lowering that price, if necessary, as we approach expiration.
For CW: A 20% trailing stop.
Out of the POWL spread today at a net credit of $13.45, for a gain of 124%.