[ferro-alloys.com]The copper price hit a fresh 2020 high on Tuesday morning.

London Metal Exchange (LME) three-month metal extended its remarkable recovery from the March lockdown lows of $4,371 to $7,331 per tonne, the highest trade since June 2018.

The strength of China’s manufacturing rebound and the country’s seemingly insatiable appetite for imports of refined copper are the fundamental bedrock of copper’s 2020 turnaround.

But funds are now increasingly in the driving seat with investor positioning at or near historical highs on both the CME and LME contracts.

As speculative momentum keeps building, so too does the risk of a reality-check on the current exuberance.

Funds in the driving seat

The change in positioning on the copper market since the depths of the covid-19 crisis in the first quarter of 2020 has dominated the scale of the physical surplus by a factor of ten to one, according to analysts at Citi.

Funds, in other words, have not only absorbed the physical impact of the pandemic but are now overwhelming it, becoming the primary price driver.

Citi like other players has evolved its own methodology for tracking speculative flows through the copper market.

But the funds’ collective buy-in to copper is clear to see in the Commitments of Traders Reports (COTR).

Money managers were net long of the CME copper contract to the tune of 78,865 contracts as of the close of business last Tuesday (Nov. 17), according to the latest U.S. COTR.

Positioning has oscillated gently over the last couple of weeks as the copper price marked time over the extended U.S. election process.

In broad brush terms, funds are still holding historically high levels of long positions with outright shorts continuing to run at very subdued levels.

The LME’s COTR, meanwhile, shows investment fund long positions at their highest level since the exchange started publishing the report in its current format at the start of 2018.

Money managers have flipped from collective net short of 19,000 contracts in March to a current net long of 38,000 contracts. There’s been a similar surge of long positions in the “other financial” category of the report.

Alas there is no COTR for the Shanghai Futures Exchange (ShFE) copper contract but the combination of rising prices and rising open interest suggests strongly that Chinese speculators are also being drawn into the market.

Market open interest has mushroomed from 294,000 contracts at the start of November to a current 367,000 lots as the yuan price hits its own two-year highs.

(Mining.com)

• [Editor:王可]