Over the last five years or more the LME stock levels have steadily decreased and the LME has actually divested itself of a lot of warehouse space because they know they will not be needing that warehouse space again in the mid term. Let's keep in mind that LME warehouse space was used to hold physical commodities, I'll only refer to copper from here on, the copper held in LME warehouses was used to back short term trades "short selling". Over the last few years as shorts became less and less active (in copper) the stock levels at the LME fell. Stock levels at warehouses fell to a point that LME decided not to publicly publish their stock levels to us punters for free on their website anymore.
I wonder if Glencore ended up finding their missing concentrate in a LME warehouse? In August 2022 Glencore noticed they had "lost"100,000 tonnes of concentrate from a LME warehouse in Qinhuangdao, more than $500m worth at the time.
@fuhc46 It has not gone unnoticed to me that trading houses like Morgan Stanley are now publishing bullish reports on copper, I believe this is the case because they have now wound down their copper shorts and they want the copper price to go up so they can profit out of the physical copper. It has taken five years or more for traders to wind down their copper shorts.
In stock trading I have read that there are only two sentiments "Buy" or "Sell" there is no such thing as a sentiment of "Hold" It has occurred to me recently that this principal also holds in commodities. The financial market is so huge and the market wants to make money, they were making money out of shorting copper, they are now going to make money out of going long on copper, they won't sit at their desks being neutral.
Good luck to shareholders who own massive undervalued copper deposits and under utilised copper processing assets, the big boys want to make money out of the copper price going up hence the copper price will go up so they can make money.
There is also the physical supply and demand side.
We have seen the price of copper go up this year based on lack of supply (about 5% of the global supply has been halted or not come onboard as forecast) I am excited about when the actual demand for copper increases on the back of this already lack of supply Woohoo
The above applies to all commodities which have been a play thing and good source of profits for the financial markets to short sell, over the medium term history, but none more than Gold. The likes of HGO and CYM in the physical copper market aka miners are set to take advantage of this change in trading trend and so too is KCN in the gold market with a similar set up of huge resources and under utilised assets.
GLTAH
