How to buy Metals One shares & are they a good investment?

To buy shares in Metals One (LON:MET1) you need a stock broker that provides access to small-cap stocks like Hargreaves Lansdown or AJ Bell. However, as Metals One is worth £24 million, there are a few things you need to know before you invest.

Firstly, and before I go into why the Metals One share price is so volatile, I would like to make it clear that I love small-cap stocks, they offer huge upside and the AIM (Alternative Investment Market) drives the growth of some weird and wonderfully innovative companies based in the UK. I started my career as a small-cap stockbroker, and when I first started investing at 18, it was always in AIM shares.

But, small-cap shares are very volatile because liquidity (the amount of shares available to buy and sell) is quite low. For example, the Metals One share price is currently 18p to sell on Hargreaves Lansdown and 19p to buy. Which means if you buy £1,000 worth of shares in Metals One, the stock price needs to go up by an additional 5% or £50 before you break even.

There has been some good news recently. Metals One recently provided an update on their Squaw Creek Uranium Project in Wyoming, which has sent the share price higher from 8p to 17p, an increase of 112%. But, this is not the first time the share price has rallied, it also rallied from 2p to 50p (a 2,400% rise), but then sharply fell from May.

So what could be going on here? I first came across Metals One when I was doing some research into the best stocks to buy now, and the top three adverts were for websites I had never heard of. Each of the top three ads leads to an article hyping Metals One:

• Guardian Globe: Here Is Why This London Stock Could Jump 1,000% Following Uranium Discovery
• Global Gazette: This London Stock Is Soaring on Uranium Discovery – Here’s Why This Could Just Be The Start
• UK Finance Pulse: Uranium Discovery Sends This London Stock Skyrocketing

This is not the first time I’ve come across these websites, I wrote about Woodbois, which was subject to a similar issue back in January 2024. If you go to the home pages of these websites, they look legit enough, with lots of news articles with a financial bais, however, the articles on the UK Finance Plus site have not been updated since the 23rd January 2025, where as the Metals One article was updated today (19th June).

If you stick with UK Finance Plus, you can see from search engine tools like SEMRush, that the site gets little to no search traffic from Google, and that it only runs adverts that point to the articles stating that Metals One is a great investment. What’s odd about this is that usually, and I see this quite a lot with crypto scams, is that the article then tries to send you via a link to a scam broker. Whoever owns the website with the article on it will get a commission from the broker (normally off-shore, so there is no FCA protection) if you then go on to open an account.

To be transparent, this is what we do too, although we only work with FCA-regulated brokers, we have reviewed thoroughly, interviewed the CEO and received a sufficient amount of customer reviews for.

So, the only thing I can think of here is that there is a little bit of pumpy, dumpy going on from these websites. In that:

1. People search for the best stocks to buy
2. They see an advert titled “Hottest stocks to buy today – No1 UK shares to watch today”
3. Go to an article about Metals One being the next big thing
4. Buy some Metals One shares
5. The Metals One share price goes up

Essentially, a pump and dump stock scheme is where someone buys a load of cheap stock in a small-cap stock, then publishes a load of articles, or social media spiv to get the price up, then sells their stock as the price goes up from new buyers coming into the market. Unfortunately, when all the pumping stops, and the schemers have dumped all their stock, the price usually falls again.

So why is this allowed? I’d say it’s partly Google’s fault too, because they are also profiting from this. But, it’s a bit tricky because even though you want to advertise a financial product in the UK Google requires you to be FCA regulated, but this isn’t really advertising a financial product, it’s advertsing an opinion piece with no commercial links.

It’s easy to see who is running these adverts and for all three websites, it’s the same firm, Island Marketing Ltd, based in the Caymans. You can see this becuase Google has been in so much trouble in the past for perpetuating scams that they have been forced to be more transparent with who is running ads. All you need to do is click on the three dots next to an advert and it will tell you who has paid for an advert, where they are based, and even that Google has verified their identity.

So if you are thinking of buying Metals One, make sure you do your own research and be aware of what is going on.

We reached out to Metals One about the articles who said they were “not aware of them and appreciate you bringing them to their attention.”

For more information on financial scams, our research from Action Fraud reveals the biggest platforms for fake ads. Financial scam ads are so rife that until the FCA has the power to fine social networks for allowing them, they will carry on. We’ve even had to deal with Facebook and Instagram cloning our Podcast to advertise fake WhatsApp investing group. Again, the advertising platforms were totally complicit and even at one point refused to take down the fake ad, becuase they didn’t think it was a scam.