With gold soaring, should advisors seek a cheaper alternative in copper?

investmentnews.com:

Sure, it glitters less than gold and silver, but copper and copper ETFs could provide upside and diversification for advisors seeking commodity exposure.  

The price of gold continues to achieve new highs as both the promise of rate cuts and the perils of geopolitics rise. At last check, the yellow metal traded at more than $2,160 per ounce, up nearly 5 percent year-to-date and up more than 18 percent in the last 12 months.

Silver, which is considered a monetary and industrial metal, is up around 3 percent so far in 2024 and more than 20 percent over the past year.

Spot copper, meanwhile, is only up 1.5 percent year-to-date, and is down about 3 percent in the past year. Does that make it a bargain for commodity shoppers?

“You’re seeing more demand coming out for copper across the globe,” said Ed Coyne, senior managing partner at Sprott. “And supply is trying to meet that. The problem is that as you get new discoveries, from discovery to extraction to production, it could be a decade or decade and a half. So we think that price discovery is going to continue to elevate over a full market cycle.”

Coyne said the big driver of copper prices going forward will be the transition to clean energy. Both wind and solar energy creation require increasing amounts of copper, especially for offshore turbine production. He added that electric cars, also a growth area, need two or three times more copper than gasoline-powered cars.

“Everything that’s happening in the cleaner energy movement needs more copper,” said Coyne, whose ETFs track copper miners worldwide. The Sprott Copper Miners ETF (COPP) offers exposure to established copper mines, while the Sprott Junior Copper Miners ETF (COPJ) tracks more speculative miners in early-stage