Three of the desk's nine prints moved on Sunday, and the two that moved hardest were oil and copper. Brent went from 84.09 to 90.12 dollars a barrel, a 7.2% session. COMEX copper added 2.3% to 6.4655 a pound. Wheat went the other way, losing 3.5% to 639.25 cents. Cobalt, urea, DAP, palm oil and the Baltic Dry all printed unchanged.
Kinshasa puts soldiers where the cobalt is
President Félix Tshisekedi has tightened the security arrangement around the mining zones of Grand Katanga, the announcement landing during his provincial tour, the same week government spokesman Patrick Muyaya was in Lubumbashi talking peace and dialogue and a new Palace of Justice was inaugurated in the city. The province produces the majority of the world's cobalt and the bulk of Congolese copper, and every tonne of it leaves by road through Kasumbalesa, Sakania or the Angolan corridor. Cobalt sat at 56,290 dollars a tonne on Sunday, unchanged, which tells you the market has not yet priced a change in how freely trucks move. Buyers with Q4 offtake out of Kolwezi should be asking their forwarders what a reinforced dispositif means for convoy timings and roadblock counts rather than reading the political copy.
China is paying a hundred dollars over the market for cathode
Chinese buyers are paying an import premium near 100 dollars a tonne for copper, with Chinese inventories down roughly 80% since March and LME stocks off 24% since May. That is the physical explanation behind a 2.3% day on the exchange price. For Zambian and Congolese sellers the arithmetic is straightforward: the premium is the reward for turning up in Shanghai with metal rather than paperwork, and the shipping window from Dar es Salaam or Walvis Bay is six to eight weeks. Zambia, meanwhile, keeps drilling: recent work at the Kabwe zinc mine has returned copper grades an expert quoted locally called consistent with industry standard.
Ninety dollar Brent, five hundred percent acid
The oil move is not travelling alone. The Middle East supplies about 24% of the world's sulphur, and the war disruption has pushed sulphuric acid, up around 500% before the conflict started, into genuine shortage that now threatens metal output, because acid is what turns oxide ore into saleable copper and cobalt. India suspended sulphur exports on 29 July to protect domestic supply, removing one of the few swing sellers. Zambian and Congolese leach operations buy that acid. Urea held at 420 dollars a tonne and DAP at 800, both unchanged, which is the calm of a market that has not yet passed 90 dollar feedstock and expensive sulphur into the granular price.
The iron ore that is not sailing from Brazil
Brazil shipped 182.0 million tonnes of iron ore in the first half, up just 1.4% year on year against 5.9% growth for the whole of 2025, and its share of global seaborne trade slipped to 21.8% from 23.0%. Australia took up the slack at 472.1 million tonnes. Ponta da Madeira loaded 69.4 million tonnes of it, Tubarão 39.1 million, and 96% of the volume moved on VLOCs and capesizes. Shipments to Oman collapsed 59.9% to 2.4 million tonnes and to Saudi Arabia 56.5%, a Gulf demand signal worth as much as the oil price. The Baltic Dry closed the month at 2,732.
Elsewhere: the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development signed a 10.04 million dollar facility with G Farms Limited in The Gambia on 28 July; Ebola has reached a further health zone in DRC's Tshopo province, on the river route north of Kisangani; and Zambia's Cancer Diseases Hospital reopened its radiotherapy wing after a 31 million dollar upgrade.