Copper's record run may just be getting started: analysts

Copper has spent 2026 rewriting its own history books. In early August, the metal pushed above $14,300 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange, a fresh all-time high extending a rally few expected to run this far, this fast. For Jacob White, Director of ETF Product Management at Sprott Asset Management , the surprise isn't that copper is at record levels, but how long the setup has been building. "We've been on the copper bull market story for quite a while now," White said in an interview with Proactive. White points to a fundamental supply deficit that Sprott expects to widen rather than close. New mine supply is notoriously slow to arrive. White cited an average timeline of 17.5 years from discovery to first production, a lag that leaves the industry structurally unable to respond quickly to demand growth. That view is echoed by Jefferies, which examined copper scarcity through the lens of how many hours of global work are required to buy a tonne of the metal. The bank found copper became steadily more abundant in the four decades before the China-driven supercycle of the early 2000s, before troughing around 2015. Since then, scarcity has been rising again, a trend it attributes to copper's growing importance in electrification. "We see rising intensity and scarcity of copper over the next 5-10 years and expect copper prices to rise in real terms as a result," Jefferies wrote, a view underpinning its call for LME copper to settle at $8 per pound, or roughly $17,600 per tonne, by 2032. Wood Mackenzie points to a similar bottleneck, estimating that supporting accelerated EV growth would require roughly $45 billion in additional greenfield metals investment over the next de...