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Copper hit an all-time intraday high of $14,527.50 per metric ton on the London Metal Exchange on January 29, 2026. By early September, prices were still hovering around $14,430 per metric ton, suggesting this isn’t a spike so much as a new altitude.
The proximate cause is a familiar one in 2026: US tariff policy. An ongoing Section 232 investigation into copper imports has markets convinced that significant duties are coming, with proposals circulating for a 15% tariff starting January 2027, potentially rising to 30% by 2028. When traders see a price cliff approaching, they buy now. A lot.
The front-loading effect
The mechanics here are straightforward. If you’re a US manufacturer who needs copper and you believe it’s about to get 15% more expensive on January 1, you accelerate every purchase you can. Multiply that logic across an entire industrial economy and you get July 2026’s import numbers: a record 225,094 metric tons of refined copper flowing into the US in a single month.
The result is a bifurcated global market. US Comex copper inventories swelled to record levels somewhere between 695,000 and 766,000 short tons, a stockpile that reflects pure defensive buying. Meanwhile, LME and Shanghai Futures Exchange stocks have fallen sharply, often dipping below 250,000 tons, because the copper that would normally replenish global warehouses has been rerouted toward American storage facilities.
To put the price move in broader context: copper crossed $12,000 per ton, then $13,000, and is now trading above $14,000, a sequence that would have seemed implausible at the start of 2025. For the full year 2025, copper prices rose more than 40%, the largest annual gain the metal has posted since 2009.
Supply isn’t helping either
Major mine disruptions in Chile and Indonesia, two of the world’s dominant copper-producing regions, have compounded the tightness. Prolonged outages at key operations have removed meaningful tonnage from the market at exactly the wrong moment, when demand from electrification and power infrastructure projects is running hot globally.
Speculative trading has intensified considerably alongside the fundamental tightness. When supply is constrained and policy risk is elevated, copper futures become attractive to financial players who wouldn’t ordinarily care much about the red metal.
What traders and industrial buyers are watching
The divergence between US and global inventory levels is the key variable to monitor. If Comex stockpiles continue climbing while LME and SHFE stocks remain depleted, the market faces a structural imbalance that could resolve in one of two ways: prices pull back as the tariff threat is clarified or softened, or prices stay elevated as global inventories fail to recover.
For traders, the setup is volatile by design. The Section 232 investigation creates a binary outcome: tariffs arrive as proposed and current positioning looks prescient, or the policy is delayed or modified and the front-loading unwinds.
Front-loading is by definition a finite activity; once US warehouses are full, the import surge slows. Mine disruptions tend to resolve eventually. What doesn’t resolve easily is the underlying demand from the energy transition, which provides a reason to think copper’s longer-term floor has genuinely shifted higher even if near-term price levels pull back from record territory.
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