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General Market Commentary
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General Market Commentary
Chinese investors hold key as global funds turn super bearish on copper: Andy Home
LONDON (Reuters) - There’s been a lot of talk about inverted yield curves over the past few days.
Specifically, last week’s inversion of the two-year and 10-year U.S. Treasury notes has raised the specter of recession, sending tremors through U.S. stock markets.
Financial market analysts are poring over their historical data for clues as to how likely and how severe a global contraction might be.
Those who follow the copper market, however, will know that “Doctor Copper” with his honorary degree in economics got there first.
London Metal Exchange (LME) three-month copper has slumped from above $6,600 per tonne in April to a current $5,800.
Global economic weakness is being led by the manufacturing sector with activity contracting or slowing just about everywhere. That includes China, the powerhouse of industrial metals demand.
Funds are now taking an ever more bearish view of copper’s prospects on the CME market.
The current “big short” is the biggest yet seen and the only surprise is that copper has not yet cracked under the weight of all this money.
It helps that copper is once again going through one of its periodic supply squeezes.
It helps a lot more that Chinese speculators don’t yet seem ready to turn as sour on copper as the CME bears.
Graphic: CME Fund Positioning
THE EVER BIGGER SHORT
Funds were holding a collective net short of 68,545 contracts on the CME copper contract as of Tuesday, Aug. 13.
That was down by 6,052 contracts on the previous week but the week-on-week change is insignificant relative to the overall scale of bear positioning.
Money managers’ short positions had hit a new all-time high of 118,448 contracts the previous week, eclipsing the previous record big short in June 2019.
Expressed relative to open interest, bear bets are as large as they’ve been since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, according to analysts at Citi. (“Commodity Flows”, Aug. 19, 2019).
You can understand the money men’s logic.
Manufacturing activity is contracting in both China and the euro zone and stalling sharply in the United States.
The automotive sector, a key driver of demand for metals such as copper and aluminum, is particularly weak as a cyclical downturn is compounded by the structural challenges of a mass migration to electric vehicles.
Against such darkening prospects, a simmering U.S.-China trade war is doubly negative, the broader impact on global trade coming with a specific hit on already stuttering manufacturing supply chains.
The financial part of the copper market is betting there’s worse to come.
SUPPLY SQUEEZE
The industrial part of the market is torn between the darkening macro clouds and copper’s still robust micro dynamics.
It’s clear there’s no shortage of refined copper right now. LME warehouses received almost 65,000 tonnes of metal last week, although the size of the deliveries may have had more to do with storage than copper price drivers.
Further up the supply chain, however, copper supply is in trouble again.
The International Copper Study Group (ICSG) forecast in May that global mine production would be flat this year. It will struggle to meet even that low-ball assessment.
World mine production actually fell by 1% in the first four months of 2019, according to the ICSG.
Smelters are having to accept extremely low charges for converting mined concentrate into refined metal.