Managing copper price volatility in 2025 markets

Copper has an intimate link with the economy given its use in the building and construction sector, power generation and transmission and manufacturing. Data centers for artificial intelligence and electric vehicles also require copper, likely increasing its future demand, according to financial journalist Terry Savage, moderator of the Copper Roundtable at the ReMA (Recycled Materials Association) Roundtables 2025, Sept. 10-12 in Chicago.

Copper’s value should increase with its demand, but recent events introduced considerable copper price volatility to the COMEX listing and were not connected to true physical demand but to the anticipation of constrained cathode flow into the U.S.

David Brooks, Pittsburgh-based global head of metals at Argus, said copper’s value spiked considerably in early July when President Donald Trump announced a tariff on copper imports would be introduced the following month because the market assumed cathode would be included.

“And then, barely three weeks later, it turned out that we weren’t talking about a tariff on copper cathode but on copper products. And so that obviously has an altogether different meaning,” Brooks added, which resulted in a steep decline in the value of copper on the COMEX.

U.S. CME cathode inventories grew during July to reach 300,000 tons compared with 40,000 tons a year ago, Brooks said. He noted that U.S. CME copper inventories increased again the week of Sept. 8 when the CME recognized a new warehouse in New Orleans.

“It’s important to note that this is not a global increase in inventories,” he said, but rather a moving around of inventories from Shanghai Exchange and LME warehouses to the CME warehouses.

Naveed Moghadam, commercial director at Germany-based Aurubis, which has a U.S. scrap-fed multimetal smelting facility starting up in Georgia, said the run-up in the COMEX price in anticipation of the Section 232 tariffs had a tremendous impact on the market because suppliers used to buying and selling on COMEX at very steady discounts “had the rug pulled out from under them.”

“If you were stuck without a place to sell your material and a building inventory because your scrap buyers continue to buy, it could have been very painful,” he said. “It was very painful for some of our suppliers in the market. Those suppliers that, let’s say, are actively participating in the export market were able to balance their positions by increasing their LME hedges and reducing their COMEX hedges. But it was still painful.”