Copper just got cheaper, and nobody really knows why yet

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-20 — metal scrap recycling industry

I watched the prices slip on my screen all last week. The buyers got nervous. The whole thing felt backwards.

When Trump said the Iran ceasefire was done in early July—actually called them "scum," which seemed unnecessary—oil jumped 8% in about an hour. Copper futures dropped below $6.20 a pound. And in the scrap yards, the bids just kept getting smaller. Day after day.

By the 17th, LME copper was at $6.22. Down 1.21% from the day before. For people like us dealing in scrap, that $0.25 per pound loss across the week is serious. Not catastrophic, but it stings when your margins are already paper-thin.

Sentiment moves fast.

The Fastmarkets survey hit 43.1 for July. Anything below 50 is bearish, and 43.1 is basically the market saying it thinks prices are going to hurt before they get better. Buyers were at 40, brokers even lower at 33.3, and sellers holding firm at 56. That gap between the brokers and the sellers tells you something—there's real friction there, not just normal haggling.

What makes this strange, or more or less strange anyway, is that supply isn't flooding the market. Chile's biggest copper producer, Antofagasta, had a terrible storm in the first half and output dropped 9.5% to 285,000 tonnes. In any normal environment, that shortage would be holding prices up. But geopolitical risk is doing more work than actual scarcity right now, which is how you know the market is on its heels.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's not that geopolitical risk matters more. It's that fear matters more than facts, at least this week.

The gap between what people think

In China, scrap copper dropped up to CNY 400 per metric ton on the 16th. Off-season, soft demand, nobody in a rush. But the traders there—the ones still active after the compliance crackdowns—have enough leverage to not panic. So prices went down, but they didn't collapse. Something like that's holding.

For recyclers here in North America, the practical question is obvious. How long does this stay loud. The Bureau of International Recycling put out a report saying nonferrous metal flows have stayed steady despite the geopolitical noise, which is at least worth knowing. The selloff feels like sentiment, not structural damage. And sentiment can turn around when talks restart.

Cold comfort if you're holding inventory you bought last month.

The Iran situation is still the thing nobody can predict. Mediators were working on de-escalation as of July 10, but a ceasefire that breaks once can break again, and every headline out of the Middle East is now a price input for copper the way it is for crude. That part hasn't changed.

Supply tightness from Chile is real. Whether it's enough to matter against the mood is what I'm trying to figure out too.

Tags: Fastmarkets, copper scrap, Iran ceasefire, copper scrap prices July 2026, Fastmarkets trend indicator bearish, Iran conflict commodity market impact