Nickel on the London Metal Exchange resumed Asian-hours trading on Monday, marking a crucial step in efforts to repair the market after last year’s unprecedented turmoil.
The metal opened for business at 1 a.m. London time, more than a year after the LME suspended trading and canceled billions of dollars worth of deals in response to a runaway short squeeze centered around top producer Tsingshan Holding Group Co. Prices surged 250% in a little over 24 hours in early March 2022, with the sharpest spike taking place during the Asian day. The market reopened a week later, but only from 8 a.m. in London.
The LME had originally planned to resume Asian trading a week ago, but delayed the restart due to the risk of volatility after its discovery that a small number of bagged cargoes in its warehouse network contained stones instead of nickel. The LME said on Thursday that no further issues were identified during a global audit of nickel stored elsewhere in its warehousing network.
The LME is hoping that the expanded hours will boost trading volumes, by making it easier to arbitrage between London and Shanghai contracts. Activity in the nickel market has remained well below pre-crisis levels, and the lack of liquidity has contributed to occasional wild price swings.
Quiet Trading
“The volume won’t be coming back quickly,” Gao Yin, an analyst with Horizon Insights, said by phone. The liquidity issues exposed by last year’s short squeeze are yet to be resolved, and investors still lack trust in the nickel contract.
Early trading activity on Monday was muted, with contracts worth 366 tons traded by 6:30 a.m. London time, compared with average daily trading volume this year of about 214,000 tons. Prices fell as much as 3.3% in the overnight session, before rebounding to trade 1.3% higher at $23,780 a ton as of 11:58 a.m. London time.
Buyers and sellers of real-world metal use the LME contract as a pricing benchmark, and also take positions on the exchange to hedge. That means the wider industry relies on the LME market functioning properly.
The nickel contract also faces a more fundamental challenge, as the refined form of metal that’s traded on the exchange accounts for a small and shrinking percentage of the world’s total nickel production. As a result, the links between LME pricing and the material actually being bought and sold to make stainless steel or electric-vehicle batteries have become increasingly strained.
Learn more: Bloomberg 