The decline in nickel stocks led to a rise in its price on the London Stock Exchange. On Tuesday, a ton of the metal was selling for nearly $23,000. At the same time, nickel has only recently risen to the highest price level since 2011.
Nickel on the London Commodity Exchange rose by two percent. The ton is now trading at $22,770. To the highest price level in eleven years, nickel is missing less than $ 1,700. This is due to reports of decreasing nickel stocks on the world market. Thus, supply is not able to satisfy the growing demand at the moment, which is to some extent fueled by speculation on the rise in the price of nickel.
Copper has also seen a similar development. The price of the brown metal rose 2.2 percent to $9,719 a tonne on Tuesday. Copper is about a thousand dollars from its all-time high of $10,747.5 per ton. It traded at this price last May.
Whether copper will break its almost year-old historical price record, however, is in the balance. There are signs of cooling demand for copper coming from China, which some analysts say may signal a cheapening of copper. A Reuters poll shows that experts expect only a slight increase in the average price of copper (by 0.6 percent) this year, while they predict a drop of more than seven percent for next year.
