Copper is up 15.8% year to date and more than 30% over the past 12 months, while gold futures are down 4.11% and 4.52% respectively over the same periods. A key input for electronics, construction and transport, and long treated as a barometer for economic activity, copper is now attracting unusual attention over supply security.

[What We Know]

• Price performance: Copper rose 15.8% year to date and more than 30% over 12 months. Gold futures fell 4.11% year to date and 4.52% over 12 months, with spot gold also lower over both periods.
• Demand drivers: Investors attribute demand to AI compute build-out, power-grid investment and defence spending, with countries and industries increasingly treating access to metals as part of national security and economic growth.
• Supply factors: Tight supply conditions combined with US tariff-driven stockpiling have added structural support to copper prices.
• Industry framing: One executive said metals long referred to as critical metals “are really becoming strategic metals, in every sense of the word.”

[Wider Perspective]

The divergence between copper and gold amounts to a repricing of what each asset is for. Gold’s trading logic has long revolved around real rates, safe-haven demand and monetary credibility, and its muted year reflects weakening dominance of that framework. Copper’s pricing, by contrast, increasingly tracks physical industrial demand and supply security. When a commodity carries a dual identity as both manufacturing input and national reserve asset, its volatility rises sharply — pulled by the global growth cycle and by geopolitics and trade policy at the same time.

Stockpiling deserves particular attention for its two-sided effects. Accumulation of raw materials in response to tariffs absorbs circulating supply and tightens physical balances in the short run, but reserves are finite: once inventory targets are met or costs prove unacceptable, that demand reverses quickly into selling. Policy-driven demand of this kind lacks trend stability, and build-out and digestion often occur within a short window, giving copper’s rally a policy-event-driven pulse rather than the smooth shape of steadily tightening fundamentals. For downstream manufacturers, the practical result is harder cost management: even without a clear pickup in end demand, procurement costs can jump in steps because of such policy-driven distortions.

Editor: GoodInfo Global News Team