This Small-Cap Space Stock Rocketed 500% Last Week, and You Probably Didn't Notice

Shares of European defence companies person been connected an upsurge ever since. One European outer institution successful peculiar caught my oculus past week erstwhile it abruptly rocketed much than 500% implicit conscionable 5 days of trading: From Feb. 28 done March 5, shares of outer telecommunications banal Eutelsat (OTC: ETCM.Y) -- which you tin mentally pronounce to yourself arsenic "EU telsat" arsenic a reminder of what it is -- jumped from conscionable $0.35 per stock to adjacent astatine $2.21. It's fixed backmost immoderate of those gains implicit the past fewer days, granted, but astatine Friday's prices, remained up much than 300% from its terms astatine the extremity of February.

What's down this insanely bully show from a little-known (in the U.S., astatine least) abstraction stock?

At first, you mightiness look astatine the stock terms and disregard the determination arsenic thing new. A $0.35 banal becoming a $2 stock, past subsiding? That happens with penny stocks each the clip -- but the taste conception of "penny stocks" differs connected antithetic sides of the ocean. Here successful the U.S., stocks costing little than $5 a stock are infamous for their volatility and rightly regarded with skepticism, arsenic they truthful often crook retired to beryllium fly-by-night operations, worth traps, and not superior businesses.

Over successful Europe, however, things enactment differently. Giant, well-funded companies similar British Telecom and British Airways genitor International Consolidated Airlines, for example, routinely commercialized for conscionable a mates of bucks a share.

And that's the lawsuit with Eutelsat, too. Although its marketplace headdress is just $3 billion, Eutelsat is simply a sizable institution doing $1.4 cardinal successful yearly concern and generating important currency flow.

And wherefore is this outer company's banal going up each of a sudden? European Union nations are readying to summation their defence spending successful effect to U.S. threats to chopped disconnected subject assistance and entree to outer quality to Ukraine, which has been warring disconnected a Russian penetration for conscionable implicit 3 years.

Ukraine's backers successful the EU look particularly acrophobic that Ukraine mightiness suffer entree to Starlink outer communications services provided by SpaceX, which are seen arsenic important to the warfare effort. In effect to this threat, Eutelsat was speedy to constituent retired successful a media connection that its OneWeb satellites "can supply an alternate for definite authorities and defence applications." Eutelsat added that it is successful talks with "European institutions and concern partners [to] alteration the swift deployment of further idiosyncratic terminals" to plug immoderate spread created if Ukraine is deprived of Starlink services.