GoldNuggets — Industrial Metals
GoldNuggets Digest: industrial metal breakout, base metals vs monetary metals, industrial metal prices vs mining stocks, copper price, copper/gold ratio...
The GoldNuggets Digest is our weekly publication. It contains “nuggets” of Charts & Research on gold, commodities, and macro —issues and insights which we think will be interesting and useful for investors.
Industrial Metals Breaking Out
Happy New Year — and Happy New High in industrial metals!
While this year has already gotten off to a bang on a number of fronts, in my view this may well be one of the most important price developments in markets so far.
Given the influence of economic growth on industrial metal demand, arguably this is both a bullish market development by itself and a macro signal of a stronger global economy heading into 2026.
Base Metals vs Monetary Metals
Base metals are starting to play catch-up vs monetary metals.
As previously mused: “The economic logic in the linkages or echoes across these metals is that you can see gold getting bolstered by fiscal largesse and monetary easing; which ultimately flows through into economic activity and greater demand for base metals (and higher prices).“
Industrial Metal Mining Stocks
With great metal prices comes great stock prices for miners. (source)
And this is a good reminder that one doesn’t necessarily need to invest in the commodities themselves, as the commodity producers’ stock prices have a habit of traveling in the same direction as the commodity prices.
Copper
Looking at copper specifically, we are witnessing here an acceleration from long-term uptrend to upside breakout. It’s no secret that copper demand is set to surge in coming years thanks to a variety of thematic demand drivers (energy transition and electrification, AI and robotics, and even geopolitics), meanwhile investment in supply has been heavily constrained.
As they say though, the best cure to high prices in commodities is high prices, so at some point if prices get bid high enough the supply will come. In the meantime it’s anyone’s guess as to how far this will run.
Copper/Gold Ratio
Gold is still comfortably in a strong uptrend with solid price and monetary momentum backing it, but with the recent developments in industrial metals the copper vs gold ratio is starting to tick up from record lows.
This echoes the point I mentioned about rotation from gold to the rest of commodities last week in the “Commodities Off-Topic ChartStorm“.
Again, it’s already an interesting year so far for 2026, and with the steadily evolving outlook for commodities I think I’m going to have plenty of material for writing these weekly briefs this year!
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