This Base Metal is as Good as Gold! But Will Tin's Winning Streak Continue?

Mainstream experts said this metal would be crushed like a TIN can by the pandemic. See what happened next -- and what could happen... now

by Nico Isaac
Updated: February 09, 2022

When I was a young girl, my friends and I had a clubhouse in the woods where we'd play after school. It was a tiny old shed we fixed up with curtains, a Wizard of Oz poster, carpet swatches, and the best feature, a tin-can-telephone made out of two Campbell's soup cans tied together on each end by a 10-foot-long string.

(Turns out, cans haven't been made out of pure tin since the 19th century, but the effect was the same!)

Our game of choice went like this: One girl stayed inside the clubhouse while the other walked the string as far as it could go outside. Then in 3-2-1, we'd both say the name of our secret crushes into the cans. If we were lucky, we could each make out the faintest whisper of a name (Tim? Tom? Jim? ) and thus be sworn to secrecy into perpetuity (or until the next weekend when the name of the crush inevitably changed!)

Today if such a string existed, held all the 3500 miles between Wall Street and High Street, one name would be revealed as the new crush for metal bulls -- T-I-N tin! And that name would be coming through loud and clear.

Here, this February 2 industry report writes:

"With the price of tin skyrocketing, investors eye the high grades of Alphamin [world's 2nd-largest tin mine]. The tin price boom continues with the price now at US$43,023/t, up ~3.5x from the 2020 low.

"The main drivers have been surging tin demand from the electronics and green energy sectors and a limited supply." (Investor Intel)

Adds another February 8 piece:

"Good as gold? Energy and industrial metals power to record highs.

"Tin now trades at more than USD 43,000 per metric tonne, a 200% rise over the past two years, motivating efforts to re-start Cornish tin mining in the UK for the first time since the 1990s."

To rehash those numbers: Tin prices have soared 200% in 2 years to record highs. And the best reason mainstream experts can come up with to explain why is -- surging demand care of a green energy movement.

The problem is the green energy boom is a post-pandemic (or at least, post-Covid-vaccine) phenomenon. But if you look at this price chart of tin, you see the metal's own boom began in March 2020, long before the first vaccines were developed in December 2020.

Tin's uptrend also began smack dab amidst the worst global economic recession since World War II, as the June 8, 2020 World Bank Global Economic Prospects Report reflected:

"The global economy will shrink by 5.2% this year.1 That would represent the deepest recession since the Second World War, with the largest fraction of economies experiencing declines in per capita output since 1870."

All of which led mainstream experts to predict a sustained downtrend for industrial metals such as tin. Here, this March 19, 2020 Metal Bulletin resets the scene from those early pandemic days:

"The LME three-month tin price hit an almost 11-year low of $13,200 per tonne during intraday trading on Wednesday.

"Bearishness toward tin has been exacerbated by news that South Korea and Japan, dominant regions in the semi-conductor sector, are largely out of the market due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus in both countries."

Wrote another February 28, 2020 Reuters:

"Tin, like other industrial metals, is highly exposed to the freeze on supply chains caused by the multiple quarantine measures being imposed by governments to contain the virus.

"Hopes [of improving market conditions] are now steadily diminishing as the virus spreads."

To summarize: The worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu caused the worst economic recession since World War II if not 1870, ALL of which was widely expected to crush tin prices like a tin can beneath a bulldozer.

AND YET -- tin prices instead turned up in a 200%, 2-year long rally to never-before-seen heights!

All of which to say: The signs of tin's strength were NOT to be found in the mainstream sources. They were, however, loud and clear in the Elliott wave assessment of the metal.

Here, we rewind the clock and settle on April 9, 2020. That day, our Metals Pro Service showed this long-term price char of tin which identified a potential bottom in place from the 2011-2020 selloff. Wrote MPS:

"Tin may be turning up from the bottom of wave C of (Y) of Y (circled)."

From there, tin turned up from its 11-year low and began to rally. On August 14, 2020, our Metals Pro Service extended its arrow higher and said: "Tin may continue rising from an important bottom"

Throughout 2020, tin soared to a decade high. Then, on March 12, 2021, our Metals Pro Service showed this chart of tin and said the road ahead should be marked by new, historic highs:

From there, tin rose and rose to a brand new high as expected. Then, on September 3, 2021, Metals Pro Service, our analysis called for a "correction in wave 4".

From there, prices indeed corrected until on September 17, 2021, Metals Pro Service wrote:

"Tin may be completing wave (4) with a truncation and turning up into wave (5) to new highs."

And that's exactly what transpired as tin turned up in an unstoppable rally to the new highs we see now.

As for where tin is headed now -- our Metals Pro Service presents weekly analysis of the metal, including labeled price charts and in-depth analysis. If everything goes according to the current wave count, tin prices may be on track to set a new record in March.

That old The Wizard of Oz poster in my childhood clubhouse reminds me of the Tin Man character, who famously warned his friends to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

Dear friends of ours, we offer a similar note of caution: If you want to stay ahead of major trend changes in the world's leading precious and industrial metal markets, pay no attention to the pundits behind the curtain of mainstream analysis.