It was 5:42 a.m. on March 8 in London when the nickel market broke. At that time of day, bleary-eyed traders are typically just glancing at prices as they swig coffee on their way to the office.
On this day, however, metal traders across the city were glued to a screen, watching the price action on the electronic market, which was already open to accommodate Asian trading. Nickel prices usually move a few hundred dollars per ton in a day. For most of the past decade, they’d traded between $10,000 and $20,000.
Yet the day before, the market had started to unravel, with prices rising by a stunning 66% to $48,078. Now, the traders watched with a mixture of horror and grim fascination as the price went vertical. Already at an all-time high by 5:42 a.m., it lurched higher in stomach-churning leaps, soaring $30,000 in a matter of minutes. Just after 6 a.m., the price of nickel passed $100,000 a ton.
For participants in commodities exchanges, a price rally is not necessarily good news. Miners, traders, and manufacturers often use the market to make short bets—that is, to make money when prices fall. And when those wagers move violently in the opposite direction, they can be hit with huge margin calls, or requests to put down more cash to back their trades. The head of one London metals brokerage recalls feeling sick as he watched the moves, realizing what the spike in prices would mean for his company, the market, and the global metals industry. “Those 18 minutes will haunt me,” says the executive, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
Nickel’s 250% price spike in little more than 24 hours plunged the industry into chaos, triggering billions of dollars in losses for traders who bet the wrong way and leading the London Metal Exchange to suspend trading for the first time in three decades.
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The spike was driven in large part by a short squeeze centered on Chinese tycoon Xiang Guangda, who had amassed a big wager that nickel prices would fall through his company Tsingshan Holding Group Co. On Monday, a week after trading had been suspended, Tsingshan announced a standstill agreement from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and other banks that would allow it to maintain its short position. The LME said nickel trading would resume on Wednesday.
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More:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...t-squeeze-how-price-surges-halted-lme-trading
