Aluminum is heading for its biggest winning streak since 1988 in the four days since the U.S. slapped sanctions on United Co. Rusal and as top exchanges said they’ll stop accepting metal from the Russian smelting giant.
The metal advanced 3 percent on Wednesday to $2,266.50 a metric by 11 a.m. on the London Metal Exchange. That’s up 13 percent since Thursday, before the U.S. announced sanctions.
Both the LME and CME Group Inc.’s Comex have said they won’t allow new deliveries of metal from Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal, the biggest aluminum producer outside of China.
“I think there’s definitely potential for prices to pass recent peaks,” Helen Lau, an analyst at Argonaut Securities Asia Ltd., said from Hong Kong. “Imagine how tight the world market is going to be if you lose a 10th of world supply, even for the short term. More and more companies are responding to the sanctions.”
After declining through most of this year, aluminum is heading back toward its peak of $2,290.50 a ton reached last December, a more than five-year high.
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