In 1969, a tiny nickel miner called Poseidon NL briefly became the hottest stock on the planet. In five months, it rose 34,899%. Enough to turn $5,000 into more than half a million bucks. And all because a shortage of nickel swept the global markets.
It drove nickel prospectors like Poseidon skywards. We’ll probably never see another Aussie stock rise so high so fast again - and stocks like Poseidon are extremely high risk at the best of times.
Occurring as it did at a time when nickel was in short supply, the discovery triggered a rush for shares in Poseidon that reverberated through the stock market of the world. Fortunes were made and lost in all parts of the globe as the shares went from $0.80 to $280.00 in five months and then down to $39.00 ten months later and, by 1976, to $0.38.
But now, more than fifty years later, we could see the same situation that sent nickel prices to the Moon play out again. Not in nickel but in another crucial commodity: copper.
In a future ‘electrified’ world, copper cannot be replaced with an alternative metal. The laws of physics all but guarantee that. It sits at the heart of the green energy transition but is also crucial for traditional manufacturing and construction.
Supply - or rather, lack of it - will be the primary driving force behind what I believe will be a new copper boom, one that could rival perhaps the largest ever recorded.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Copper, I think.
