Copper

Ask ten people what a mining company really produces, and the vast majority would say gold, perhaps iron ore; not many will note that to get the phone in their pocket onto a shelf it needed lithium, cobalt and rare earths; or that the wind turbine down the road works on heavy copper wiring.

The gap between what people know and what is actually mined this page was created for.

Battery metals, copper, iron ore, lithium, rare earths, uranium and everything else that fails to fit neatly into those six. They do not move together. Iron ore has run on the same construction-and-steel logic for decades, largely out of Australia. Copper used to be boring in the same way, until electrification started pulling it into EVs, grids, and data centres all at once, and boring stopped applying.

Lithium and battery metals are the volatile cousins in this family, prices spiking and crashing as EV demand outpaces or overshoots new mine supply, sometimes within the same eighteen months. Rare earths are the one nobody watched closely until export restrictions in a handful of producing countries turned them into a genuine political flashpoint. Uranium spent years being ignored entirely, then nuclear power came back into fashion and utilities started signing contracts again like it never left.

Gold, silver, coal, and zinc round things out under other commodities, smaller headlines individually, but plenty of portfolios still live or die on them.

Pick a category above, or browse by region if you would rather follow a country than a metal.