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Jack Farchy and Mark Burton
4 min read
(Bloomberg) — One of the highest-profile copper bulls is back predicting new price records, as Donald Trump’s threat of tariffs drains global stocks and creates what he sees as unprecedented opportunities for trading profit.
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Kostas Bintas became one of the best-known metals traders during his years building Trafigura Group’s copper book into the world’s largest, before his departure in late 2023. Now spearheading a push into metals at energy trader Mercuria Energy Group Ltd., he is again calling for copper to surge to record highs, up by as much as a third from current levels.
The huge amounts of metal being drawn into the US will leave the rest of the world — and crucially, top consumer China — perilously short, Bintas said in an interview.
“We think there is something exceptional happening in the copper market,” he said. “Is it unreasonable to expect a copper price of $12,000 or $13,000? I’m struggling to put a number on it because this has never happened before.”
Bintas was one of the first of a growing chorus of traders and investors to predict that copper was about to enter a multiyear bull market in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and that rising demand for electrification would outpace supply growth. At Mercuria, he’s teamed up with another prolific bull: former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. metals strategist Nick Snowdon, who roughly a year ago was forecasting average prices of $15,000 a ton in 2025.
Still, copper bulls have been disappointed on several occasions, most recently last year when prices surged to a record high above $11,000 a ton, only to falter as Chinese buyers stepped back from the market.
Now the dislocations caused by Trump’s threat of copper tariffs have changed the market dynamic. While the US has yet to impose broad tariffs on copper imports, domestic prices have soared to over $1,400 a ton above the rest of the world, creating a huge incentive for traders to ship every spare ton to the US.
“In terms of the margins per ton, I’ve never seen a better trading opportunity,” Bintas said.
The shift of inventory to the US means the Chinese copper market will be left with insufficient stocks, Bintas said. Chinese buyers — who account for more than half of global demand — will be forced to compete with the US market. At the same time, the large volumes of scrap copper that typically flow out of the US have effectively dried up.