Patterns in World Metals Prices

This paper uses a descriptive statistical approach to identify longer-term patterns, or empirical regularities, in the prices of 16 prominent metals from 1950 to 2010. We also examine some related aspects of the behaviour of the corresponding volumes. Our approach is to summarise the data in the form of price and volume indexes and comparison matrices that provide a convenient way of making pairwise comparisons of different metals. Finally, we also present some evidence on the sensitivity of metal prices to variations in supplies.