Volatility at the Expo, Steadiness in the Still

Word reaches my desk of the coming Scrap Expo 2026, where the learned men of the trade will gather to fret over copper's volatility — the many factors, they say, that send our red metal swinging like a saloon door in a March wind. I read the headline and smiled, for I have watched copper leap and stumble across the better part of a lifetime, and I will tell you plainly: the price dances, but the metal never wavers.

Today the ticker shows #1 Bare Bright at about $6.03 the pound, up a modest two-tenths of a percent — a gentleman's nod rather than a lurch. Volatility, the experts call it. And they are not wrong. Data centers hunger for copper wire by the mile; the electric carriages of this modern age swallow it whole; the plumbers, the roofers, the motor-winders all bid against one another. Add China's appetite, the miners' troubles, and the speculator's nerves, and you have a market that trembles daily. Small wonder the scrapper wants to know where he stands before he loads his truck.

But let a man step out of the trading pit and into a distillery, and he learns copper's true and unchanging worth. There stands the pot still, the alembic, gleaming like a bishop's helmet — and it is copper, always copper, for reasons no stainless vessel can argue with. As the vapor rises, the red metal reaches out and seizes the sulfur compounds, the sharp and sickening volatiles, and pulls them from the spirit before they ever reach your glass. This is not showman's talk; it is chemistry the monks knew in their stone cellars, that the Appalachian moonshiner knew in his copper worm coiled through cold creek-water, that every honest whiskey-maker knows to this hour. Trust copper, and the liquor comes out clean. Trust volatility, and you will drink poison.

There is your lesson, friends. The price of copper is volatile because the whole modern world leans upon it at once — the roof turning green above your head, the water line beneath your floor, the wire humming in the wall, the still breathing in the shed out back. A thing wanted by everyone will always jostle in value. But its virtues are fixed as the stars.

In my counterstamping years I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, passed hand to hand through every eating-house and grog-shop in New England. Those coins wandered, their worth argued over by shopkeepers — yet the copper in them was the same steadfast metal it had always been. So it remains. Let the Expo debate its factors. You and I know the red metal keeps its promise, whether it fetches six dollars or sixty.

Hold your copper. Sell it honest. And raise a copper-cleaned dram to the steadiest metal ever conjured.

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