Gold Holds $4,400 as Copper Nears Record on Grasberg Outage

Gold is going nowhere fast at $4,408.04/oz, essentially flat on the day, and that pause is the tell. The metal is up 32.15% year over year and 8.73% over the past month, consolidating from strength rather than exhaustion. World Gold Council data puts Q2 central-bank purchases at a record 288.9 tonnes, the kind of reserve-diversification demand that doesn't chase headlines. The risk here sits in the futures pit, not the vault.

The positioning data is what I'd watch into the weekend. CFTC's COT report puts Managed Money net long gold at 130,766 contracts for the week ended August 4, up nearly 11,000 week over week. That's not yet at the 200,000-plus extremes that have preceded sharp corrections in this market before, but the trajectory matters on top of a third of a year's gains. Silver's positioning is the cross-check: its net long of just 11,974 contracts is a fraction of gold's crowding, the usual pattern when speculative money lags a gold-led move.

Copper is the sharper supply story right now. COMEX copper is trading near $6.70/lb, within half a cent of the August 5 record, after an August 8 boiler leak forced Freeport Indonesia to shut the Gresik smelter that processes Grasberg ore, a mine already running below capacity from an earlier incident this year. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence's read is that this single outage could tip the global refined copper market into a 2026 deficit. Unlike gold's macro bid, this is a physical bottleneck, and physical bottlenecks don't resolve on a Fed press conference.

Energy ties the complex together. Brent pulled back 0.68% to $88.37/bbl after six straight sessions higher, and bears will point to a 17.4-million-barrel US crude build, the largest since early 2023. But that build is domestic. It says nothing about the roughly 20% of global oil flow that transits the Strait of Hormuz, where Kpler's tanker-tracking data shows just 8 vessels crossed on August 11 against a pre-war average near 120 a day. The IEA now warns that global stockpiles are depleting fast enough that reopening urgency has increased.

None of this is a one-way trade. A credible Hormuz resolution would pull gold's safe-haven premium and Brent's war premium out at the same time, and a crowded 130,766-contract gold long is exactly the position that unwinds hard on a surprise. Watch $4,400 gold as the pivot and the Gresik repair timeline as the tell on copper.

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