Copper Up 22% YTD; Will Dominate in 2018 Guest(s): Gianni Kovacevic
Copper is up 22 percent year-to-date and rallied 50 percent since a little over a year, an upsurge thanks to the modernization of energy, said Gianni Kovacevic, CEO of CopperBank and a best-selling author. “The future of energy is electrification,” Kovacevic told Kitco News on the sidelines of the Silver and Gold Summit in San Francisco. “The very thing that makes it possible to go away from fossil fuels is an increase in electrification - it’s copper. This type of copper takes three, four, even five times more per megawatt of utility when you create transfer or utilize greener energy,” Kovacevic said. He added, “[C]opper is likely to decouple, price-wise, from most commodities due to this shift in energy consumption. [There has been] a correlation of oil to copper, 90% of the time, over the past 40 years. This is breaking down.”Kovacevic said that a good way for investors to buy into the metal is through junior copper miners. Based on historical buyout ratios compared to today’s levels, he said, “there’s a lot of optionality and value proposition for investors.”Speaking on gold, while he does not see much industrial utility here, Kovacevic sides with Jim Rickards’ view of the yellow metal being money rather than an industrial commodity.