Metals are the part of the commodity complex this course has not touched at all, yet they are core business for houses like Glencore and Trafigura and a frequent gap in a candidate’s knowledge. This lesson fixes that. It covers the base metals and the exchange that prices them, the London Metal Exchange, whose unusual date structure trips up people who only know oil futures. It explains how metal is actually produced and sold as concentrate, and how the treatment and refining charges (TC/RCs) are the metals version of the crack spread, a form arbitrage. It covers the physical layer of warehouses, premiums, and the queues that once became a scandal. And it gives you the basics of precious metals, which trade quite differently from the industrial ones. As always we build the unfamiliar pieces on a plain example first, then map them to the desk, and we work a TC/RC calculation and an LME spread by hand.
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