Other forces turning around the Cobalt...

Other forces turning around the Cobalt price:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4243918-cobalt-miners-news-month-february-2019

"The Wall Street Journal reported that Glencore plans to cut copper and cobalt production at its Mutanda mining project in Congo. Nomura noted that Mutanda produced 27,000 tonnes of cobalt in 2018, representing 25% of global cobalt production."

On top of this "Uranium contamination" (read cobalt contract negotiations) mean ZERO cobalt production from Glencore's Katanga this year. I suspect Glencore is single handedly turning around the Cobalt price after Chinese firm GEM reneged on their binding contract last year.

On the flip side: 

On February 5 - S&P Global reported: "Panasonic eyes upstream investments to secure battery raw materials.....That could come in the form of offtake agreements, especially for critical materials such as cobalt and nickel.....On Monday, Ford's Miller told the audience that automakers could look to start investing directly in cobalt mines in order to secure supply."

http://thedrive.com/tech/26675/cobalts-perfect-storm-rattles-electric-car-supply-chain
"After modest expansions of 39 GWh and 31 GWh in 2014 and 2015, megafactory investments exploded with 149 GWh announced in 2016, 253 GWh in 2017 and a staggering 428.3 GWh in 2018. China is expected to hang onto its roughly 65% of megafactory capacity, but more importantly the processing supply chain that turns raw or minimally-processed cobalt into battery-grade materials is almost all located in China. These investments will create capacity of more than 1 TWh by 2028, requiring an increase in battery-grade cobalt supply from 50,000 tons per year currently to more than 200,000 tons per year."
(Current total cobalt market is about 120,000 t per year).

"...Rawles cautions, actual demand for cobalt hasn't gone away. In fact, Benchmark saw demand rising between 10 and 15 percent between 2017 and 2018. He also says the push toward low-cobalt battery chemistries, like the so-called 8-1-1, has "subsided" over the past year due to technical challenges and safety concerns, as well as low cobalt prices."

Lots of things in play - the enormous number of battery megafactories under construction, the underlying grinding force.