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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2078 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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IDK man, copper is pretty convincingly in decline. We basically haven't found any new large scale copper discoveries in the last 15 years. Grades are continually declining. We're currently mining ores that are 0.6% copper!!! And this is only going to continue to get worse. Unless we find an extremely large easy to exploit source of copper approximately ~now, copper production is guranteed to fall in the next 10 years.

Source

But are you long on copper futures?

Yea dude, copper has been way outperforming the SP500 for the past few years. I'm long on copper futures and my portfolio has been doing excellent.

HGW00 is up 57% over 5 years and the S&P is up 87% in the same timeframe - but at least your money is where your mouth is.

Copper is up 20% this year and S&P is only up ~17%. I only got into the copper futures around Feb.

You should have gotten into silver or even gold.

Those are different trades, though. (Warning: speculation on the price fluctuation of assets) The gold rally is due to a combination of "debasement trade" (the idea that current debt levels are unsustainable and the only way out is via printer) and a bet on multipolarity (USD status as reserve currency being threatened, due to a variety of reasons), silver is a speculative derivative of the same trade, as far as I know there is a lot of silver to mine everywhere still.

What @thejdizzler is talking about is a structural undersupply of copper, long term. I'm not actually sure if copper futures are the best expression of that trade, I assume you've bought the longest dated ones available?

I've just bought an index fund that's supposed to track copper futures. CPER is the ticker name. I believe it is a basket of futures up to a year out.

I believe

Fund literature

The investment objective of CPER is for the daily changes in percentage terms of its shares’ per share NAV to reflect the daily changes in percentage terms of the SummerHaven Copper Index Total Return (the “SCI”), less CPER’s expenses.

The overall return on the SCI is generated by two components: (i) uncollateralized returns from the Benchmark Component Copper Futures Contracts comprising the SCI, and (ii) a daily fixed income return reflecting the interest earned on hypothetical 3-month Treasuries, calculated using the weekly auction rate for 3-Month Treasuries published by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. SHIM is the owner of the SCI.

Commodity nameCopper
Commodity symbolHG
Allowed contractsAll 12 calendar months
Max. tenor12

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