Commodity demand is a measure of the strength of economic development. It is a leading indicator because it shows anticipated demand. Every new apartment building and office block requires kilometers of copper wire. Copper is one of the foundation metals of modern economic development.

Copper is one of two benchmarks for the hard commodities. The first benchmark is the price of oil, which we considered last week. The second benchmark is set by the copper price as traded on the London Metals Exchange (LME) or the New York Metals Exchange (NYMEX). The behavior of the LME price is slightly different from the behavior of price on the Shanghai Futures Exchange.

The LME weekly copper price chart shows a powerful V-shaped recovery from Dec 2008. The new uptrend is defined by a single line starting from the low in Feb 2009. There are three key patterns in the copper market.