Hedging the Red Metal: A Scrapper's Shield in a Shifting Market

Step closer, friends, and mind the bear — he grows restless when the market stirs, and stir it has. This morning the red metal climbs another 1.6 percent, with honest #1 Bare Bright fetching near $6.21 the pound across these United States. A fine figure for the man with a full barrel, a cause for sweat upon the brow of the man still buying.

And here comes word that a house called Pillar means to simplify the dark art of commodity hedging for recyclers. Now, I have driven my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and I confess hedging was never my trade — but I know a sound notion when I smell one. The scrapper lives and dies by the day's quotation. He fills his yard with wire and radiators and bright shavings today, not knowing what the exchange will whisper when he sells tomorrow. To lock a price, to tame that wild swing — why, that is no gambler's folly. That is a prudent man building a roof before the rain. A tool that renders it plain to the plumber and the picker, rather than the province of Wall Street conjurers, is a tool worth having.

For consider what you are hedging. Not some common stuff, but the metal that carries the lightning. Copper is the conductor that electrifies every parlor, every motor, every humming data-hall and silent electric carriage of this modern age. It is the plumbing behind your walls, the green-weathered roof above the courthouse, the bright bottom of your wife's best pot.

But you know where my heart truly lives — in the still. Copper is why your whiskey is worth drinking. From the monastery alembic to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted the red metal above all others, for copper alone seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles from the rising vapor and lets fall a spirit clean and sweet. A stainless kettle is a cold-hearted thing; it cannot do this work. Centuries of brandy, rum, and good corn liquor owe their virtue to copper. So when the price of copper leaps, know that it rides upon the thirst of nations as much as upon any factory order.

A volatile market is a copper still before the heads come off — all pressure and promise. The hedger is the man who keeps a steady fire and does not scorch his mash. Whether you buy his insurance or not, I counsel this: know your grades, weigh honest, and remember that what passes through your hands has warmed coins, carried current, and sweetened spirits since the old world was young.

Up she climbs. Pour yourself a measured dram — distilled through copper, naturally — and sell when the fire is high.

Yours in the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins