Base metals are entering a brand-new primary uptrend.
By Sam Gatlin, Jason Perz
December 12, 2025
This entire year, we’ve been pounding the table on one idea: investors are wildly underestimating the structural shift unfolding inside base and industrial metals.
With Copper futures and the miners closing November at fresh all-time highs, this trade is heating up significantly.
What looked like a quiet corner of the commodities market a year ago has become one of the most powerful rotations in the world.
The data consistently show that participation is broadening, leadership is expanding, and capital is flowing aggressively into the metals space.
We believe it's the early stages of a brand-new primary uptrend for the group.
So let's talk about how we can profit from this...
We're starting with one of the most objective and representative ways to visualize this. Here's the Invesco Base Metals ETF $DBB:
DBB tracks the most widely traded base metals on earth, including Copper, Aluminum, Nickel, Zinc, and Lead. It’s a well-designed way to capture participation in the base metals space without the complexity of managing each futures contract individually.
And DBB is doing something extremely important...
The ETF is putting the finishing touches on a textbook multi-year bearish-to-bullish reversal pattern. This comes after years of grueling sideways churn.
So long as the buyers hold the breakout here, the path of least resistance is higher for the foreseeable future.
We want to own DBB above 22, with a target of 27 over the coming 3-6 months.
We're also seeing breakouts beneath the surface that support these new highs in DBB.
This includes Tin futures:
We first outlined Tin futures in July when the price was printing fresh 52-week highs.
Since then, Tin has done precisely what we anticipated: it has made a series of higher highs and higher lows.
Until our target is achieved, there's no reason to overthink the trade. The breakout is holding, momentum is strong, and the trend continues to accelerate.
Tin isn’t alone on the new highs list...
Participation is spreading to products we haven’t covered yet, such as Zinc futures.
Zinc futures are among the most underappreciated charts in the base metals universe.
It represents nearly 10% of the DBB fund, and its long-term structure looks almost identical to the basing pattern in DBB.
Zinc has spent years trapped within a massive range, repeatedly failing to breakout.
But now, the price is pushing directly into that resistance zone again, with higher lows building underneath it and momentum turning higher.
New multi-year highs from here would send momentum into escape velocity.
We want to buy Zinc futures on strength above 3,800, with a target of 4,800 over the coming 3-6 months.
For our Commodities Trade of the Week below, we’re highlighting a stock that's showing relative strength, and it looks poised to lead the next leg higher.
