A note on copper

Two stories pull on the same metal. Electrification, meaning vehicles, heat pumps and grid upgrades, was already set to lift copper demand for a decade. Data centres, and the power infrastructure behind them, now pull on the same wire at the same time.

Supply was planned for neither. A new mine takes the better part of a decade from discovery to production, ore grades are falling, and the past ten years brought under-investment rather than the opposite. The gap between what electrification and computing will ask for and what supply can deliver over the next five years is, in our reading, structural rather than cyclical.

Structural gaps are where patient capital is paid. They are also where timing is hardest: the constraint is real, but the market can ignore it for longer than seems reasonable. We hold exposure where the supply evidence is verifiable, and sized so that being early is survivable.

A view on a commodity is not a forecast of next quarter's price. It is informational only, and not investment advice.