Many valid points posted in the responses to your post. My take...

Many valid points posted in the responses to your post. My take on it.

The Lithium trade is real - we only have trading in the physical commodity at all stages of refinement - in the ground, DSO, spodumene concentrate, brine, industrial grade, battery grade, etc.

There is as yet no future trade. LME may be actively investigating but nothing yet - so we don't have the confounding activity of the investment community turning this particular market in to the latest branch of the commodities casino. If that ever happens, the market will turn on the misconceptions and whims of Wall Street traders and all predictability goes out the window. Pray that we don't see lithium futures anytime soon...

So for now at least, what we see is real activity between real suppliers and real buyers.

We see Benchmark Mineral Intelligence posting the rise and rise of their Lithium index.


That BMI index chart goes up and up and up in spite of the additions of capacity from GXY and NMT, (not to mention the DSO shipments from MIN - how desperate is this market?) Rising prices are not consistent with an imminent oversupply.

There are new developments on the way but how many of them will arrive in that 2018 to 2020 window - few will be early to the party; most will be late. Particularly relevant to the hard rock scene, will converting capacity and mine capacity keep pace with each other - will the converters invest before securing their feedstock?

Love him or otherwise, the usually conservative Joe Lowry is predicting great things for 2018



There are plenty of deals going off - in recent weeks
KDR/SQM
PLS/Great Wall
NAL/CATL
GXY/Panasonic rumours

Everyone is scrambling to lock up future supply, and yet there are many deals still to come


The level of deal activity, and particularly the number of downstream participants investing upstream indicates some very real supply fears in the market. I think we are seeing the start of a panic. All those EV announcements will push activity up through the supply chain over the next few years.

And, no matter that some of those EVs are a few years away - if you can't do a deal, and you can't buy futures, but you have a commodity whose price is going up, well you might just want to warehouse it in this time of abundance, and look at returns better than money in the bank. 2020 is not far away.