If you had to pick a nice safe place to build a mine, Afghanistan wouldn’t be on your list of preferred choices. But miners must go where the deposits lie, especially if the resource in question is about to become scarce. This resource is so scarce that its price could leap several times higher within the next few years.
That’s what has drawn China to build one of the biggest foreign investment projects in Afghanistan’s history. It’s securing supplies of one metal that is essential to the massive energy grid China is building, not to mention homes and workplaces for hundreds of millions of its people.
That metal is copper, one of the most popular binary options trades. While most Americans take it for granted, you would make a serious mistake if you did so, not to mention miss out on one of the best investment opportunities around.
The China Metallurgical Group paid $3.4 billion for the rights to a copper deposit near Kabul, outbidding the U.S., Canada, Russia, and Kazakhstan by $1 billion. Obviously, China wanted to make sure it won the auction. Reportedly, China even sealed the deal with a $30 million bribe to the Afghan Mining Minister!
Apart from dealing with huge security problems, China must build all the infrastructure to support the copper mine—a smelter to refine the ore, a 400-megawatt power plant to power the smelter, a coal mine to fuel the power plant, a railway to take the coal to the power plant, and another railway to ship the binary options copper to China.
But China doesn’t mind. It knows how scarce copper will be in a few years, and how expensive it will be. Copper may become the next new precious metal.
Just consider… over the past two years, while the U.S. has been fighting off the worst recession for many decades, commodity prices have made a terrific rebound. In the last 12 months, copper prices rose 34%, silver rose over 30% while gold rose over 30% and currently sitting near an all time high.
Meanwhile, since the U.S. can’t conceive of copper prices much above where they are today (roughly 4X what they were in 2003), copper isn’t on our government’s list of critical metals that should be stockpiled. So, in a few years, we could be paying skyhigh copper prices if we want to build hybrid cars, homes, or new energy supplies.The only bright spot in all this is that you stand to make a fortune with binary options if you invest today in companies that own large and growing copper reserves. Right now, there are only a handful of good copper stocks. Four of the most promising copper stocks have large reserves located in much safer places than Afghanistan. All of them have performed nicely over the past few months as copper prices have climbed from their 2008 lows. But the fundamental and technical analyses suggest that their biggest moves are yet to come.
