The Copper Briefing Service

BME’s Copper Briefing can help you avoid expensive mistakes. For instance, in the 2005 – 2006 bull market, there were endless headlines of people losing large sums of money thinking that the copper price was already too high and either hedging prematurely (producers) or de-stocking and deferring pricing (consumers) or going long mining equities and short copper (some hedge funds). Amongst that long list of names hitting the headlines for the wrong reasons, only one was a BME customer. The rest benefitted from our better reading of the physical copper balance and our dual view of the market: part industrial raw material, part financial instrument. We are still providing that service and it is still most relevant in helping you to avoid costly mistakes.

BME’s Copper Briefing saves you time. In twenty minutes each month, you can learn almost all that you need to know about this important global market. Besides a time-saving distillation of the news, you will be getting in-depth analysis, something very different from brokers’ daily commentaries, which run the risk of “explaining away” every tiny price shift, often citing quite spurious reasons. Much of the daily shifts in the market really are noise not signal; with BME’s monthly Copper Briefing you get the signal rather than the noise.

The Briefing also provides what we believe to be the best round-up of news on the under-reported fabricating sector. The Briefing’s Editor, Paul Dewison, provides not only specialist knowledge and understanding of this industry, but also a thorough trawl through the websites of fabricators, a very labour-intensive task (time-starved executives can benefit from leaving this to us). We cover mining news very well too, incidentally. Each news item cites the source or sources, so that the reader can follow up very easily if he or she wishes. Our concentrates market contributor, Gordon McKnight, provides expert commentary on this sector.  

Starting with the October 2009 issue, the Briefing has been further improved. It forecasts mine, smelter and refinery production, and consumption, and prices, quarter-by-quarter through 2010. It covers stocks along the process chain in great detail. Its tables and charts are very user-friendly and accessible. It sets out BME’s base case forecasts very clearly in a way that you can quickly explain to your boss or your colleagues, no matter how harassed and over-extended they might be. And if you want to go beyond the base-case forecasts, although it is a separate service, you can license BME’s interactive price models to explore other scenarios: different exchange rates or consumption growth, different interactions between hedge fund activity, commodity index funds and the physical market, thus tapping into the price analysis and modelling skills of Peter Hollands and Adam Sotowicz. In this way, the Briefing can become part of your inter-active view of the world.

The Briefing is not just a piece of paper: subscribers can pick up the phone, or e-mail, and ask the authors questions.