1. The expansion of copper consumption and substitution consumption are the direct factors affecting copper prices, and the development of copper industry is an important factor affecting consumption. For example, after the 1990s, the pipeline copper in the construction industry in developed countries increased greatly, and the construction industry became the industry with the largest copper consumption, which promoted the international copper price to rise from 65,438 to 0,990 in the mid-1960s. The housing operating rate in the United States also became one of the influencing factors of copper price. Since 2003, the development of real estate and electricity in China has greatly promoted the growth of copper consumption and become one of the factors supporting copper prices. In the automobile industry, manufacturers are promoting the use of aluminum instead of copper to reduce the weight of vehicles, thus reducing the amount of copper used in this industry. In addition, with the rapid development of science and technology, the application scope of copper has been expanding, and copper has begun to play a role in medicine, biology, superconductivity and environmental protection. IBM (Weibo) used copper instead of aluminum in silicon wafers, which marked the latest breakthrough in the application of copper in semiconductor technology. These changes will affect the consumption of copper to varying degrees.
2. The production cost of copper is the basis of measuring commodity price level. The production cost of copper includes smelting cost and refining cost. Different mines calculate different copper production costs. The most common economic analysis is to adopt the "break-even cost of cash flow", which decreases with the increase of by-product value. After 1990s, the production cost showed a downward trend. At present, the average comprehensive cash cost of pyrometallurgy in western countries is about 70-75 cents/pound, and that of hydrometallurgy is about 45 cents/pound. At present, the output of copper hydrometallurgy accounts for about 20% of the total output. The calculation of domestic production cost is different from that of international production cost.
3. Processing fee (TC/RC): The change of processing fee (TC/RC) reflects the change of the game status of mines and smelters in the copper industrial chain. In recent years, with the concentration of copper resources and the rapid growth of smelting capacity, TC/RC has decreased year by year. For example, in 2008, the TC/RC signed by BHP Billiton, Jiangxi Copper and Tongling was 47.2/4.72, which was 2 1% lower than that in 2007. Although the fund trading direction of the fund industry has a long history, it didn't flourish until 1990' s. At the same time, the degree of fund participation in commodity futures trading has also been significantly improved. Judging from the evolution of the copper market in the past decade, funds have played a role in many big markets.
4. The funds are large and small, and the operation methods vary widely. Generally speaking, funds can be divided into two categories. First, macro funds, such as arbitrage funds, are large in scale, ranging from billions of dollars to tens of billions of dollars, and are mainly used for strategic long-term investments. The other is short-term fund, which is managed by CTA. Very small, usually around 1 100 million dollars. Short-term operation depends on technical analysis, so it is also called technical fund.