Interesting - Ni’s resilience This latest attempt by China to manipulate/dampen the metal rally by announcing among other things release of Cu, Zn, Al from its strategic reserve (see link) might have resulted in a bit of a price setback for Ni, BUT on this occasion vs the early March Tsingshan Ni matte ev announcement, LME stocks have actually continued to fall. You recall the day Tsingshan made that announcement Mar 2 LME Ni stocks went up by more than 10k in a day in contrast. So today we stand at 238k tons with only 182k live warrants. This is a 6 month low approaching a 12 month low. So there remain for us some very nice fundamentals at play.
A couple quick comments: The Chinese strategic reserve does not include Ni. This is the first release since 2010. The fact they are taking this measure means they are seeing real bottlenecks in the physical market which is a massively BULLISH sign for base metals.
Here is a great read re their strategic metals reserve and the decision to release:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/what-we-know-about-chinas-metals-reserves-release-2021-06-17/