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00:00 Josh
Copper, it’s been on a tear even though prices edging lower on Tuesday. Yahoo Finance’s Jake Conley joins us now for more. Jake.
00:07 Jake
Yeah, thanks, Josh. Copper, you’ve seen, like gold, like, you know, a few other of these precious metals. Copper’s a base metal but the same kind of crazy rally, right?
00:19 Jake
Same time last year, it was trading below 9,000 per ton. Now, it just crossed $13,000 per ton. That’s a huge jump.
00:26 Jake
And I think it’s really coming down to three factors, right? The first is this tariff policy uncertainty from the Trump administration.
00:35 Jake
You saw last summer when Trump initially announced tariffs on copper, the market rushed to get copper over to the US, try to get ahead of that, created a lot of artificial tightness.
00:44 Jake
Second thing here is a wave of supply disruptions. On the macro side last year, the Grasberg mine in Indonesia, a few other huge sites that had major incidents, it’s going to take some supply off the market.
00:53 Jake
But the third kind of unknown variable right now that’s really coursing upward is the demand from the AI and data center boom, right? Copper is a necessary metal here. You don’t get these AI data centers without copper for wiring and all these other components.
01:05 Jake
You put all that together, you get this huge race upward in prices. However, I’m starting to see some analysts say maybe this is a little overheated. Are we overstating some of this? But for now, copper’s just been racing upward.
01:15 Josh
Before I let you go, what about Nat gas? What are you seeing there?
01:17 Jake
Yeah, interesting picture. You’ve seen it trading down over the last couple of sessions as traders are taking profits from that huge jump we saw last week ahead of Winter storm Fern.
01:25 Jake
However, Noah is coming out with some new predictions of a possible next round of storms coming this weekend.
01:31 Jake
It’s looking smaller right now, a little more contained to the the far eastern seaboard as opposed to the entire storm of this last of the entire country this last storm, excuse me.
01:40 Jake
But that said, if you do start to see severe weather predictions, you could easily see prices start to move back up as traders start to race back in and pipeline capacity retightens.
01:46 Josh
All right, Jake, thank you. Appreciate it.
01:47 Jake
Thanks, Josh.