Copper Price

This chart plots the front-month COMEX copper futures settlement as a daily close over the last three years, from the source named under the chart. The page refreshes hourly from the live data and shows the current reading with the trailing 90-day change — nothing cached, estimated or substituted.

Copper goes into wiring, motors, plumbing and nearly everything electrified, which is why traders call it Dr. Copper — the metal with a PhD in economics. Unlike gold it has no monetary bid: the price is almost pure demand for making and building things, so it reads as a real-time vote on global manufacturing activity.

For US markets a sustained rise usually signals firm industrial demand — construction, grid buildout and factory output — which is the friendly face of commodity inflation and generally accompanies healthy earnings. A sustained fall is the early warning: copper often rolls over months before the slowdown it is pricing appears in employment or output data, because its buyers are the first to cancel orders.

The caveats: copper prices global demand, not American demand — a move driven by Chinese construction or a South American mine strike says little about the US cycle. It is a futures settlement and a daily close, so contract rolls and intraday swings are smoothed away. And like every commodity, supply shocks can lift the price even while demand is weakening.