After breaking past $13,000 per ton for the first time, copper continued its strong advance as bullish traders and investors were motivated by a renewed rush to ship metal to the US.
After rising more than 4% on Monday, benchmark prices on the London Metal Exchange jumped as much as 1.5% to a record $13,187 a ton. Since mid-November, the metal has now gained more than 20%.
Due to President Donald Trump's continual threat of import taxes, US copper prices are consistently higher than those on the LME, which has led to a rush to send metal to the US.
This has sparked concerns that the rest of the globe would run out of copper and encouraged optimistic investors who are already drawn to the metal because of its use in everything from data centers to batteries for electric vehicles.
According to Helen Amos, a commodities analyst at BMO Capital Markets, "the historic US inventory build is still in the driving seat of global copper prices."
Al Munro, senior base metals strategist at Marex, claims that a strike at the Mantoverde mine in Chile contributed to increased market speculation.
Munro stated, "The truth is that this is a speculative money-led bid as the market sees further topside, especially during the first quarter of 2026, with many having been sidelined hoping for a dip."
As governments worry about the availability of essential metals, copper is becoming more and more important. Due to its position in electrical wiring, it is essential for the energy transition.
However, miners and dealers have long cautioned that investments in new mines were not keeping up with the new sources of demand, and older mines have seen a number of failures.
It has also benefited from a wider increase in the price of metals, with investor flows pushing gold, silver, and platinum to all-time highs in recent weeks, while aluminum and tin have reached multi-year highs.
Some of the supply disruptions that contributed to the increase in copper prices last year included a fatal accident at Indonesia's second-largest copper mine and an underground flood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
According to Ewa Manthey, commodities strategist at ING Groep NV, "the market has little buffer due to years of underinvestment and ongoing mine disruptions, while tariff policy uncertainty and stockpiling are intensifying the squeeze on available metal."
However, analysts and traders noted that the most recent action was motivated by uncertainties regarding future US tariff policy.
Before abruptly ending the trade in late July by exempting refined copper from import taxes, Trump sparked a tremendous rush to transport copper to the US in the first half of last year.
However, the trade has resurfaced in recent months as US prices have once again traded at a premium due to a promise to reexamine the issue of import duties. According to trade figures, US imports of copper reached their highest level since July in December.
In a November interview, Kostas Bintas, the prominent head of metals at Mercuria Energy Group Ltd., predicted that "this is the big one" for copper bulls and cautioned that the US import rush would leave the rest of the world without copper.
According to ING's Manthey, "low inventories across major exchanges outside the US are leaving little room to absorb any further supply shocks."
According to UBS, the US accounts for less than 10% of global demand yet holds around half of the world's stockpiles. This implies that there is a chance that supply will be reduced elsewhere. London's cash-to-three-month spread is still steadily declining, a sign of impending tightness.
UBS Group AG analysts, including Daniel Major, stated in a report on Monday, "We estimate the global refined copper market was in surplus in 2025, but metal/inventory flows were distorted by US tariffs that resulted in a material lift in US imports." At 9:25 a.m. Shanghai time, three-month copper was last trading at $13,156.50 a ton on the LME.
