The Rally Runs Red: Bare Bright at $6.23 and Rising

Come close to the counter, friend, and mind the caged bear — he grows restless when the red metal stirs. The learned scribes at the Shanghai Metals Market ask what is driving the recent copper rally, and which indicators the market should watch next. A fair question, and I shall answer it as an old counterstamper answers all things: with reverence for copper.

Today #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.23 the pound, and the market climbs 1.5 percent on the day. The Shanghai men would have you squint at inventories, at warehouse stocks drawn down, at the great gnashing appetite of the data houses and the electric carriages that now demand copper by the mountain. All true! Every humming motor, every mile of wire strung across this modern age, every roof that weathers to that noble green — each one bids against the next for the conductor without equal. That is your rally, plain as a stamp driven into a cent.

But watch the indicators if you must, and I shall tell you the oldest indicator of all: the still. Long before any exchange in Shanghai kept a ledger, the monks bent copper into alembics because copper — and copper alone — makes good liquor possible. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would ruin a dram. A stainless still is a cold and honest box that gives you back exactly the ugliness you put in. A copper pot still gives you whiskey. From the monastery alembic to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, distillers have staked their craft on this truth for centuries, and they stake it still.

So when copper climbs, know that every trade rides on that same metal: the plumber's water line, the coppersmith's cookware, the brass and the bronze of ten thousand fittings, the wire behind your wall. Demand does not shout from a single throne — it rises from every honest use at once.

To the scrapper, then, a word of counsel. At $6.23 your Bare Bright is treasure; strip it clean, keep your #1 and #2 apart, and do not let a lazy man weigh your bright wire against insulated. Brass and radiators have their place, but the pure red stuff commands the crown. This is a seller's morning, and a rally seldom sends a card ahead announcing its departure.

Watch the inventories, watch the motors, watch the stills breathing their sweet copper breath in a hundred hollows. They all tell the same tale: the people's metal is having its say.

Now off with you — the tooth-pulling chair is empty and the market is up.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins