The next chapter of zinc's bull market story has just opened with a mass raid on metal sitting in London Metal Exchange (LME) warehouses.
More than 100,000 tonnes of exchange stocks have been canceled in the space of a couple of weeks, meaning the metal is no longer available for trading purposes and can be physically loaded out of warehouses.
The remaining "open" tonnage, as it's termed on the LME, has now fallen to 203,350 tonnes, the lowest since December 2008.
This can be seen as another sign that tightness in the zinc raw materials market is starting to feed through into the refined metal part of the supply chain.
That's good news for the many zinc bulls out there, who have already seen the price of London zinc rise from under $1,600 per tonne to $2,860 over the last year.