If you've got the money to swing it...copper
Report: Metals price rally to continueMarch 21, 2008 1:23 PM ET
All Associated Press newsNEW YORK (AP) - Despite this week's decline in some benchmark metal price indexes, analysts say underlying fundamentals will keep pushing up the prices of many metals, especially copper and aluminum.
The Standard & Poor's Metals and Mining Index fell 7.3 percent this week as investors grew uncertain about demand.
But Barclays Capital, in a report released Thursday, said "supply issues have not gone away and low copper, tin and lead (inventories) mean that there is very little cushion in these markets, so should supply disruptions emerge then prices are likely to react widely."
The report forecasts a rally in base metals from April through June.
"Currently copper looks the tightest market from a fundamental perspective. We see a very substantial market deficit emerging in the first half of 2008 and inventories returning to all-time lows and prices testing all-time highs," the report says. Barclays forecasts copper rising from about $6,800 per ton in the first quarter of this year to approximately $8,300 by Oct. 1.
A combination of increased physical buying of aluminum and continued tight supplies of electricity will lift that commodity's prices in the second quarter, the report says.
The investment house urged clients to "go long" on aluminum and as for copper "build length on dips to high $7000s."
Prices for tin and nickel are headed higher, too, Barclays said.
One exception to the updraft is zinc, the price for which Barclays forecasts falling to $1,800 per ton by fourth quarter -- roughly half its average price in the second quarter of last year.
Report: Metals price rally to continue: Associated Press Business News - MSN Money