Copper's third win in a row isn't quite a victory lap

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-10-19 — Bing News — zinc price LME

Copper climbed again. Three sessions running now, which sounds like momentum until you look at where it actually is.

Close to where it's been lately.

The story everyone tells about copper these days—supply disruptions—holds water, more or less. Chile's Codelco partially shut El Teniente after a landslide. Antofagasta's Centinela mine got wrapped up in labor talks that stalled operations. These aren't small things. Copper mining doesn't restart on a schedule.

But here's what's interesting. Analysts at Panmure Liberum looked at the actual disruptions reported for 2025 and 2026—Grasberg in Indonesia, Kamoa-Kakula in the Congo, all of it—and found they added up to somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 tons of contained copper lost annually. That sounds huge. Except it represents only about 30 to 50 percent of what industry forecasts assume will be disrupted every year anyway.

So the physical tightness is real. Inventories on the LME fell 1,625 tons to 232,275 tons. The cash contract traded at a $181.50 premium over three-month futures, which is what you see when people actually need metal now and warehouses don't have enough. That's not speculation.

Yet Panmure also reckoned speculative positions might be driving prices harder than the underlying supply picture alone would justify.

The dollar's the other piece. It stayed near an 18-month high, even after a brief dip. Metals priced in USD get more expensive for everyone using other currencies. That's not a copper problem specifically—it's a headwind for all of them.

Aluminum, meanwhile, got hit differently. Down 0.6% to $3,035.50 per ton that day. Indonesia started shipping more supply. When metal flows, prices fall. Simple.

Zinc dropped too—actually, that's not quite right. Zinc fell 0.4% to $3,741.50, but the longer picture is more complicated. Stocks got tight in Western warehouses.

None of this was a clean story where one force dominated. Copper had supply disruptions working for it. Zinc had supply tightness too, but demand and regional flows cut the other way. Aluminum just saw supply normalize.

The third consecutive session up for copper means something, but not as much as it sounds.

Source: "Supply concerns remained at the forefront of market attention after Chile's Codelco partially suspended operations at its El Teniente mine following a landslide." — Economies.com

Tags: zinc trading Southeast Asia