COPPER traders gathered in London for the annual LME Week are growing increasingly nervous about the market’s fragility, despite prices hovering near record levels, said Bloomberg News on Monday.
The concerns crystallised on Friday when President Donald Trump’s threat of “massive” additional tariffs on Chinese goods sent copper tumbling, highlighting how vulnerable the rally has become to external shocks.
Ivan Petev, head of base metals at Gunvor Group, captured the unease amongst traders at the Financial Times Metals and Mining Summit. “When I trade the price, I’m a little bit aware of the fact that we are melting up in everything,” he said. “We’re melting up in gold, we are melting up in Nvidia, we are melting up in all the US tech and well, okay, chickens may come to roost.”
The anxiety reflects an uncomfortable reality: whilst prices have surged, demand from actual consumers has been lacklustre. Instead, the rally has been driven by catastrophic supply disruptions and investor interest in metals as an alternative to the dollar.
“Unfortunately, we’re exposing many vulnerabilities of the mining industry,” said Juan Carlos Guajardo, founder of Plusmining. “The industry doesn’t have the necessary strength to face this current period.”
A series of fatal accidents—flooding at Congo’s Kamoa-Kakula complex in May, a deadly rock blast at Chile’s El Teniente mine in July, and last month’s mudslide at Indonesia’s Grasberg facility—have severely constrained production.
For traders, Friday’s slump marked the latest instalment in a familiar pattern of Trump-driven volatility. One trader lamented over the weekend that trading copper in 2025 felt more like trading cryptocurrency.
Trump subsequently moderated his comments, helping copper recover on Monday morning, said the newswire.
