Last week, CESCO World Copper Summit in Santiago, Chile was organized, where the overall sentiment seemed to be decisively more constructive than in recent years.
The supply disruptions, current and potential, were the main topic on the conference sidelines.
In general, we left with a feeling that miners had more spare units for the spot market this year after reducing annually contracted copper concentrate volumes with smelters.
Opinions also diverged about the progression of future labor negotiations in Chile.
In our conversations with two companies whose labor contracts are due to expire later this year, the companies pointed out they do not expect major obstacles during the negotiations.
Trade recommendations:
In the gamut of metals trading, silver was up 0.13% at $17.938 a troy ounce.
Platinum rose 0.70% at $946.60 a troy ounce, while palladium gained 0.30% to $792.35 a troy ounce. Copper inched up 0.08% to $2.606 a pound.
Initiate long in Jul’17 LME Copper: While we do expect the copper price to eventually weaken in steps to $5,000/t by the end of the year, we don’t expect that weakness just yet. With supply still bleeding and stronger Q2 demand ahead of us, we expect the metal to claw back some of its recent losses and trade back up to average $6,000/t in Q2.
In essence, we expect cathode oversupply to decline in Q2 as a concentrate gap opens and feeds into cathode production cuts. Seasonally-strong second quarter demand should also help, further drawing down inventories and supporting prices.
Went long Jul’17 LME copper at a price of $5,771.50/t on April 7, 2017. Trade target is $6,640/t with a stop loss at $5,480/t. Marked to market on April 7, 2017, at $5,817/t for a gain of $45.50/t or 0.8%.
Stay long Dec’17 LME Aluminum In general we maintain our constructive view for aluminum prices over the medium term. That being said, the major catalyst underlying our constructive view, Chinese capacity cuts, remains solidly a H2’17 event, meaning that in the immediate near term prices may be susceptible to fluctuations around shorter term dynamics.
Given this, we felt it was prudent to close the relatively more expensive leg of the trade (entry level of $1,940 on March 1) for a small profit in late March while retaining the lower entry leg of the trade in order to continue to express our medium-term bullishness.


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