Bare Bright at $5.90: The Red Metal Opens 2026 Ascendant

Well now — the learned scribes at Recycling Product News have taken it upon themselves to divine the copper price trends of this first quarter of 1926, no, forgive me, 2026 — a year so far ahead of my own showman's days that I can scarcely believe the red metal has not yet worn thin from all this handling. Yet here she stands, up a healthy 1.6 percent on the day, with #1 Bare Bright fetching some $5.90 the pound. A tidy sum for the scrapper who knows to strip his wire clean and sort his honest grades.

I have counterstamped my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time — driven "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into the people's metal as it passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house from Boston to my own Fort Wilkins, bear caged and tooth-pulling chair at the ready. So permit me to speak with some authority: copper does not merely trend. Copper endures. The prognosticators fret over quarters and percentages, but the red metal keeps a longer ledger than any market man.

Consider, if you will, the still. Every clean dram of whiskey, every bright brandy, every honest jar of mountain moonshine owes its virtue to copper. Long before your data centers and your electric carriages hummed their modern tune, the monks bent their alembics of copper over the fire, and the Appalachian man coiled his copper worm through cold spring water. Why copper and not some cold stainless vessel? Because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the mercaptans, the foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the pour. Copper makes good liquor possible. A stainless still gives you a spirit that bites like a mule. So when I read of prices climbing, I think of the distiller who must buy his pot still by the pound — and I say, pay it gladly, for you are buying flavor itself.

And copper's other lives multiply by the hour. She is the wire that electrifies the whole wide world, the plumbing that carries clean water to your table, the bright bottom of the cook's good pan, the roof that weathers to a noble green, the bronze of statues and the brass of bells. Now they tell me she feeds the great thinking-engines and the horseless motors of this age. Small wonder the trend points upward — there is not enough of her to go around, and every enterprise of consequence wants a share.

So sort your radiators from your brass, strip your insulated wire, and keep your Bare Bright bright. Q1 opens with the red metal on the rise, and the alchemist is not surprised in the least.

Yours in the eternal fire of the crucible,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins