Commodity investing isn’t for the faint of heart or for the buy-and-hold investor, even one with an exceptionally long-time horizon.

Human demand for copper is constantly changing and the law of supply and demand is about as close as you can get to a truth on our small and fragile planet. Of course, like all commodities, copper prices are cyclical. Copper is crucial to manufacturing electric cars, batteries, and renewable power generation, all of which should provide a powerful tailwind for copper demand.Ĭopper is Critical to ESG and Clean Energy… That’s a lot of building to come!Įven more significant however is the embrace of renewable energy technology in both the developed & developing worlds, as well as a paradigm-shift in investing toward a preference for environmental, social, and corporate governance, aka ESG. According to a 2018 UN study, just 55 percent of the world live in cities – a proportion that will increase to 68 percent in 2050. That doesn’t mean, however, the demand for copper is set to decline.įor one thing, large swathes of the developing world hope to take a page out of China’s playbook. In the last year, the Chinese government has started to crack down on inefficient and speculative use of resources like copper, as well as to intervene in commodity markets to manage prices. The boom in the price of copper in the 2000s owed much to a huge swell of demand in China, which has been building non-stop for over two decades to encourage urbanization, provide electricity for its rural hinterlands, and to artificially prop up its overheated economy. Over the centuries, humans have found new uses for copper, from sheathing the hulls of wooden ships in the 18th and 19th centuries to the battery in whatever device you are reading this on right now.Ĭopper’s biggest usage today, however, is in construction. Due to its malleability, high thermal conductivity, resistance to corrosion, and most importantly, its occurrence in nature in a directly usable metallic form, copper usage was an early mark of civilization and a necessary step on the path to the bronze and iron ages. Humans have been using copper for millennia.

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