Copper is a Must Own
Gradually widening supply and demand deficits may lead to a global shortage of copper, pushing the price for the metal to $20,000 per metric ton in as soon as four years, Bank of America (BoA) warns.
Copper inventories measured in tons are currently standing at levels seen 15 years ago, able to cover just three weeks of demand, Michael Widmer, a commodity strategist at the US’ second biggest bank, said in a note seen by CNBC.
“Linked to that, we forecast copper market deficits, and further inventory declines, this year and next,” the analyst said.
“With inventories close to the pinch-point at which time spreads can move violently, there is a risk backwardation, driven by a rally in nearby prices, may increase,” he added.
A rise in volatility resulting from falling inventories was not without precedent, according to Widmer, who said that nickel shortages in London Metal Exchange warehouses in 2006-07 triggered a surge of more than 300% in nickel prices.
BoA expects prices for copper to spike to $13,000 per ton in the upcoming years after hitting $10,000 last week for the first time in nearly 10 years.
“If our expectation of increased supply in secondary material, a non-transparent market, did not materialize, inventories could deplete within the next three years, giving rise to even more violent price swings that could take the red metal above $20,000/t ($9.07/lb),” Widmer said.
High prices for copper were additionally boosted by a weaker dollar and increasing moves toward green infrastructure, according to David Neuhauser, founder and managing director of US hedge fund Livermore Partners.
“I think copper is the new oil and I think copper, for the next five to 10 years, is going to look tremendous with the potential for $20,000 per metric ton,” Neuhauser told the media.
The strategist added that there are some very solid small cap companies that have massive production potential, and valuations are attractive and could make a great return on investment.
NIST Graded Our Post-Quantum Cryptography. Zero Failures.
NIST's Algorithm Validation Test System generated test vectors nobody had seen, we answered them over the ACVP protocol, and NIST graded the result: 2,130 cases across ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA in every parameter set offered, zero failures, demo certificate A11025. This is what that proves, where we deliberately drew the claim narrower than NIST's own matrix, and why the FIPS 140-2 sunset on 21 September makes the distinction between being graded and grading yourself worth understanding.
The Problem Is Not the Problem
People treat the Jack Sparrow line as a joke. The attribution is a joke. The sentence is not. Forty years in markets says the same thing Epictetus said in 125 CE and Robert Merton named in 1948: the event is finite, and the story you appoint to govern it is not. This essay walks the quote back to its actual sources, draws the loop that turns a feeling into an order, and sets out the four places a rule written in advance cuts the loop. Faith is not a hedge. It is a stance.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.