2011 Halftime Report: The Cues for Copper

Copper slightly disappointed investors, ending the first half of the year with a decline of 3.50 percent. Worries about global inflation and, more specifically, the potential slowing of China’s economy weighed on copper’s price. The red metal rose 5 percent quickly in the new year, but similar to zinc, lead, palladium and platinum prices, declined sharply at the beginning of May.

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Don’t Turn Out the Lights on Commodities Just Yet

The prices for many commodities suffered the worst week in recent memory last week. Oil prices dipped below $100 per barrel, gold fell below $1,500 an ounce and silver gave back much of the past month’s gains by falling to the $35 an ounce level. The prices for other commodities such as sugar, tin, nickel, aluminum, lead and copper also pulled back.

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A Decade of Hot Commodities

We’ve updated our popular Periodic Table of Commodity Returns, and the headline news should come as no surprise – 2009 was a complete turnaround from the sector’s 2008 performance.

Commodities (as measured by the Reuters-Jefferies CRB Index) rose 24 percent in 2009, the largest single-year increase since the early 1970s.

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