Intrigue in the Copper Market

I have a piece up at CNBC this morning about copper’s recent run up and the sizable mystery buyer behind it.  We’re about to get not one, but two physically-backed copper ETFs.  The speculator class is already abuzz with how these two instruments may affect the metal’s pricing.

Here’s the story:

According to reports in the Telegraph, last week a mystery buyer stepped into the LME pits with a massive $1.5 billion purchase of copper- equal to “between 50pc and 80pc of the 350,000 tonnes in reserves”.

Many on the LME suspect that this mystery buyer is actually JPMorgan and that the bank is positioning itself ahead of their copper ETF launch. This pushed up the metal’s price to its highest level since the Lehman Brothers meltdown in September of 2008 (over $8700 per tonne).

And this kind of action could be just the beginning…

Read More:

The Financialization of Copper (CNBC)