Zombie thread revival I've been dabbling in the copper arena over the past few weeks doing a little side job. Anyway, long story short, there's so much copper millberry on the market right now it's taken a lot of scrap metal merchants by surprise (although unfortunately copper thieving hasn't dropped off). No one can reasonably afford to ship the scrap at these low prices, so inventories are going through the roof. It's actually cheaper to buy refined scrap metal than dig the ore out of the ground at the moment. Like I posted here earlier, unless you're stacking like these guys below you're out of the game;
I used to use the copper bullion for show so my silver didn't get all tarnished. Copper will go up, but like people have been saying space is an issue. And then think about a copper shortage, it would just breed a new market. Something cheaper and as effective as copper would really kill the market when it was figured out. And liquidation in my opinion would be like stacking REEs. Who do you sell to? Companies utilizing the metal would need insane amounts. Also, it is a metal that is a main mined metal meaning it isn't a byproduct like Platinum and Palladium. I don't want to be a naysayer, and I don't do ETFs. But this is one case where I'd buy the ETF (Because the upswing would leave you able to liquidate, and then after the crash you're not sitting on a thousand pounds of copper you will have to scrap). Basically, if I were to copper stack I would hit up old mines with a detector and look for some copper nuggets. Another reason is there are a lot of old copper mines that shut down. If price goes high enough, they would theoretically reopen the mines that just weren't profitable at this price. Anyway, just my two wheaties
Copper scrap prices seem to be creeping back up a bit, although it's never really dropped much unlike scrap steel or precious metals. I'm still stacking solid copper ingots, or copper stackers as I like to call them, I found cutting them out of heat sinks with an angle grinder type thing is much quicker and less work then punching them out with hammer and bar.. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPFbiidqLEU[/youtube]
