Lead Extends Advance to 15-Month High as World Leaders Gather

(Bloomberg) -- Lead rose for a seventh day to a 15-month high as world leaders discussed economic growth at a summit in Hangzhou, China. Other industrial metals traded mixed as U.S. markets were closed for a holiday.

Speculators have been buying lead, Dee Perera, an analyst at Marex Spectron Group in London, said by e-mail. The bullish position rose to 16 percent of open interest on the London Metal Exchange as of Sept. 1, from 9.3 percent a week before, she said.

“Improved auto production rates for China, the U.S. and Japan this year, together with existing mines, plus lack of scrap, offer medium-term price support,” Morgan Stanley analysts including Tom Price in London, said in an e-mailed note Monday.

Lead for delivery in three months climbed as much as 1.7 percent to $1,975 a metric ton, the highest since May 29, 2015, and was at $1,969.50 by 5:50 p.m. on the LME. Prices rose 3.6 percent last week, narrowing a discount to the LME’s top-performing metal zinc. Tin reached the highest since January 2015.

Global growth may be the worst since the financial crisis, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned at a panel in Hangzhou. Separately, U.S. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping discussed measures to tackle overcapacity at the gathering of world leaders.

In other metals news:

• Copper was little changed at $4,626 a ton as inventories in warehouses tracked by the LME expanded for a 10th day to the highest since September 2015, while a strike at Codelco’s Salvador mine in Chile started Monday with operations suspended.
• Nickel rose 0.1 percent to $10,070 a ton. Shipments of nickel ore from the Philippines may shrink as much as 30 percent this year as the country cracks down on errant miners and after some companies cut output in the first half due to weak prices and poor weather, a top local producer said.
• The FTSE 350 Mining Index rose 0.4 percent, led by a 3 percent rally in Acacia Mining Plc.
• Aluminum fell as much as 1.2 percent to the lowest since June.

To contact the reporter on this story: Agnieszka de Sousa in London at atroszkiewic@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Thomasson at lthomasson@bloomberg.net, Tony Barrett, Nicholas Larkin