Forecasting uranium prices: Some empirical results

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical and comprehensive forecasting analysis of the uranium price. Prices are generally difficult to forecast, and the uranium price is not an exception because it is affected by many external factors, apart from imbalances between demand and supply. Therefore, a systematic analysis of multiple forecasting methods and combinations of them along repeated forecast origins is a way of discerning which method is most suitable. Results suggest that i) some sophisticated methods do not improve upon the Naïve's (horizontal) forecast and ii) Unobserved Components methods are the most powerful, although the gain in accuracy is not big. These two facts together imply that uranium prices are undoubtedly subject to many uncertainties.

Keywords

• Uranium price
• Unobserved components models
• Exponential smoothing
• ARIMA
• Theta method
• Artificial neural networks