Copper Leaps at Week's End While Buyers Hold Their Breath

Friends, gather round — the red metal made a sudden vault late in the week, and the whole downstream trade froze like a cat that has heard a footstep on the stair. The good men at Shanghai Metals Market report prices shot up as the days closed out, and the buyers, wise to the ways of a jumpy market, folded their arms and adopted that oldest of postures: wait and see. I know it well. I have watched a saloon full of men do the same when the barkeep raised the price of a dram a single cent.

Here at home our #1 Bare Bright sits at about $5.89 the pound, and the market on the day moved not a hair — flat as a counterstamped cent. But do not let that stillness fool you. A flat day after a leap is merely the market catching its breath, the way vapor gathers in the neck of a still before it commits to the worm.

And speaking of the still — for I can never stay long from my favorite subject — remember why copper commands such devotion that grown traders sit on their hands rather than let it slip away. This is the metal that makes good liquor possible. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm running cold through the mash barrel — all copper, and copper for a reason no stainless vessel can counterfeit. As the spirit rises in vapor, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that would otherwise ride into your glass. It gives back clean whiskey, bright brandy, honest moonshine. The monks knew it in their monastery cellars; the Appalachian man with his hidden worm knows it yet. Centuries of drinkers owe their unspoiled cup to this red conductor.

That is the thing to hold in your mind when the price jumps and the buyers hesitate. Copper is not merely a number on a ticker. It is the wire that carries the lightning into the great humming data-halls of this modern age. It is the plumbing behind your walls, the green-weathered roof, the humming heart of every electric motor and carriage. And it is the soul of the still. When a metal serves that many masters, small wonder its price kicks like a mule now and again.

So to the scrapper deciding whether to haul his hoard in today: the market has paused, not retreated. Bring your bright wire in clean, keep your brass and your radiators sorted honest, and take a lesson from the distillers — patience and copper have always rewarded the man who trusts them.

Yours in the eternal glory of the red metal, — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins