I am an investment planner in precious metals and energies markets. For the last year or so, the whole precious metals market and the energies have being going up. Just in the last few weeks these commodities have dropped a number of points, but this is going to only be temporary.
In the last 5 years, the average cost of gold has been increased from 280 US to 560 US average price per ounce. This works to about 40% per year average. Gold is the basic leader for the metals markets in general. Metals like Zinc, copper, and silver are considered low end precious or semi-precious metals. Aluminums is not far behind, since its cost to produce is going up very strongly. By-the-way, in case you are interested, if you put your money in a quality gold mining company about 5 years ago, it would be worth more than 200% today in comparison to what you started with.
You can see the gold charts here:
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In the Far East and in China, there is a tremendous industrial growth going on. It is far greater than what we can imagine over in North America or in Europe. All the large corporations are starting to manufacture most everything over there. There are incredibly large markets opening up in Asia, Russia, South Africa, and other areas. The North American and European consumer markets are actually shrinking. These manufactures need many types of materials, oil, and most of the available precious metals to do their manufacturing. Most of the zinc, copper, gold, and silver, end up in the electronics industry. The mining industries are having a difficult time to keep up with the orders for the metals. They have expressions, that say that they cannot get the minerals out of the ground fast enough for their customers. Or, the metals are sold before they come out from the ground.
Some of the factors that effect the metals markets are the world US dollar value, the inflation, the US interest rates, the demand for the metals, and also the political stability.
During unstable times, many of the large investors start putting their money in to gold, thus driving the gold price up. The other metals generally follow, because all the markets are related in many ways. The price of oil also follows up and down in a near pattern to that of the gold. Every day, there are millions of shares being bought and sold in the oil and precious metals. When there is a lot of buying of these commodities, the price generally goes up.
This explanation only touches on the subject to give you an idea. The exact detailed reasons for the movement of the metals and energy commodities prices is fairly complex to explain in a simple email text.
Mark down the prices of what you are paying in the store for the copper pieces. In a few years from now, take in your note pad, and make the comparison. You should see a big difference.