Copper eased in London on Monday for a second weekly decline. Benchmark three month copper on the London Metal Exchange fell 0.5 percent to 14,247.50 dollars a tonne in Shanghai hours, Bloomberg reported, while Reuters put the contract down 0.56 percent at 14,242.50 dollars a tonne by 0300 GMT. The most traded contract on the Shanghai Futures Exchange rose 0.55 percent, tracking Friday’s overnight gains in London, which left the two benchmarks pointing in opposite directions on the day.
The London softness is a stock story. Copper stocks in LME warehouses surged last week to their highest since July after deposits into registered warehouses, mostly in North America, Reuters reported, easing the supply worries that had carried the metal to a record 14,875 dollars a tonne on September 11. Expectations of a United States tariff on refined copper imports have pulled metal into the United States and thinned stocks elsewhere, and Marex senior metals strategist Alastair Munro described macro fears and expectations of a shift in that draw as a bearish backdrop.
China is the counterweight. Chinese smelters are in maintenance and stocks in Shanghai monitored warehouses fell more than a quarter last week to 54,356 tonnes, Reuters reported, while the Yangshan premium, the gauge of demand for imported copper, stood at 168 dollars a tonne on Friday. Bloomberg reported the premium extending gains to its highest in its data going back to 2017, and Minmetals Futures head of base metals research Wu Kunjin warned that doubts about the United States tariff and weakening Chinese consumption into winter could ease the tightness from here.
Other metals were flat to lower in London, with aluminium down about 0.4 percent and nickel down between 0.9 and 1.19 percent across the two reports. The site market tables put United States copper at 6.56 dollars a pound, up 1.24 percent, a different contract and snapshot from the London session, so the day’s honest read is divergence: London easing on visible stocks, Chinese import demand still paying a high premium, and the tariff draw the hinge between them.