Copper Forecast: 6.6895 Rebuilds Toward the 6.7775 High

• 6.6895 a pound, up 1.52% on the session, roughly 1.3% below the 6.7775 high made on 26 August.
• Treatment charges have collapsed from around $21 a tonne to effectively zero, the clearest signal available that concentrate is scarce.
• 6.6247 decides the next move: it is the first average beneath price and the last one lost in the mid-August selloff.

Fundamental Analysis: Copper

The tightness is in the concentrate market rather than the refined one, which is why it has been so persistent. Treatment charges — what smelters are paid to process ore — have fallen from roughly $21 a tonne to effectively nothing, meaning smelters are now competing for feedstock on terms that would have been unthinkable two years ago. A boiler leak took a major Indonesian smelter with 340,000 to 400,000 tonnes of annual capacity offline on 8 August, and a Democratic Republic of Congo concentrate export ban has been running since late June. Flooding at one of the country's largest complexes may cost a further 57,000 tonnes this year.

The counterweight is that inventories have not confirmed the scarcity everywhere. Registered warehouse stocks in London stood at 238,575 tonnes on 20 August, up around 16% from February's lows, while US-registered stocks have swelled to a record near 650,000 tonnes as traders positioned ahead of possible tariffs. That is metal in the wrong place rather than metal that does not exist, but it does mean the physical squeeze is regional as much as global, and cash metal trading $138-148 above the three-month price reflects that dislocation.

The balance is a market up roughly 47% on the year with a supply story that has not finished playing out and a demand story that is unremarkable. Estimates for the 2026 balance range from a modest surplus to a deficit of around 640,000 tonnes, which is an unusually wide spread and tells you how much rests on whether the disrupted capacity comes back.

Technical Analysis: Copper

August has been a wide, choppy range rather than a trend. The move that matters started at the 6.4220 low of 20 August and carried to 6.7775 on 26 August before a two-day pullback into the averages. Price at 6.6895 has bounced from that test and sits above all four: 6.6247, 6.6036, 6.5782 and 6.5172.

Resistance is 6.7775, then the early-August highs near 6.87. Support is the 6.6247-6.6036 pair, then 6.5782, then 6.5172. A four-hour close below 6.4220 would end the sequence of higher lows and invalidate the read.

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