$10,000 in Oklo Stock at Its High Is Worth About $2,300 Today

Buy Oklo (NYSE: OKLO) at its 52-week high of $193.84, and a $10,000 stake would be worth about $2,300 as of this writing. Shares of the nuclear reactor developer trade near $44, down roughly 77% from that peak.

The odd part is what happened underneath the price. The company's operating record improved almost continuously while the stock collapsed.

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The record improved on the way down

Oklo booked its first sales in company history in the second quarter: about $1.2 million, mostly from engineering and consulting services. Much of that revenue arrived with businesses Oklo acquired in June, so it's a purchased start more than an organic one. But a company that went public with no revenue at all now has some, plus the beginnings of a services operation.

The bigger milestone came from Texas. Oklo's Groves Isotope Test Reactor in Lockhart reached first criticality (a controlled, self-sustaining nuclear reaction) less than a year after groundbreaking, the company said in early August. Groves is the first reactor in the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program to get there on private land, built from scratch.

The facility is designed to produce isotopes for healthcare, industrial, and national security applications. And it gives Oklo something the market has long doubted it could deliver: an operating nuclear facility, built fast.

The losses, of course, are still enormous. Oklo has lost about $153 million over the past 12 months, and management is spending faster to reduce the risks around its first projects, not slower.

What the drawdown priced out

So the business made progress, and the stock lost three-quarters of its value anyway. Both things are true, and the price investors were paying at the top is what reconciles them.

At $193.84, investors were paying more than four times today's price -- a valuation that assumed data-center power deals and profitable plants stacked years into the future, all arriving on schedule, from a company that had never generated a dollar of revenue and whose first commercial power plant remains under construction.

Today's $8.6 billion market value is a fraction of what investors once paid. But it is still about 7,000 times the company's trailing revenue -- an arguably extreme price in its own right. The drawdown didn't turn Oklo into a value stock. It moved the stock from pricing in everything to pricing in a lot.

However you weigh it, the operating record between the two prices runs in Oklo's favor. Revenue exists now, and a reactor reached criticality in under a year. The price still asks investors to fund years of losses before the power business proves out. And the 77% drawdown says less about what Oklo has done than about what its shareholders once paid for the promise.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.