Miner equities fell across every group in the latest market tables. Gold miners dropped 3.95 percent, silver miners dropped 3.96 percent, copper miners dropped 3.28 percent, uranium miners dropped 3.80 percent, lithium and battery miners dropped 2.69 percent and rare earth miners dropped 4.23 percent. BHP fell 1.89 percent and Rio Tinto fell 1.99 percent, a smaller decline than the sector baskets.
The underlying metals did not fall with them. Gold futures rose 0.25 percent, silver futures eased 0.21 percent and copper eased 0.52 percent in the same tables. A fall of nearly 4 percent in gold miners on a day when gold rose is a company and positioning move, not a commodity move, and the same applies to rare earth and uranium miners, whose falls were the largest in the table without a matching metal print.
The move reverses the split recorded in the previous edition, when precious miners fell with weaker metals while lithium, uranium and rare earth miners rose. Two consecutive sessions of sharp, opposite divergences underline that miner baskets are currently trading on flows and single name news as much as on metal prices.