Copper has rarely done this in the past 60 years

From Dean...

When I turned my quote machine on Thursday morning, it was awash in a sea of flickering red flashes. As I frantically scrolled through page after page searching for something with a green tick, I was relieved to find Dr. Copper up more than 2% and registering a new 52-week high. I immediately went to work to see if I could find an information edge in what many call the commodity with a "Ph.D. in economics."

The rolling return chart is one of my absolute favorite tools for analyzing the big picture of any security. I like to start with the 1-year and zoom out in one-year increments until I reach the five-year. With the 2%+ gain in copper futures on Thursday, the 1-year rolling return crossed above 49%.

There is nothing special about this value. It's just what I noticed on Thursday.

Looking at detailed forward returns for 11 markets and sectors, the economic message from the surge in copper appears to be following the typical post-recovery script, with copper itself having the best tendency to continue higher in the months ahead.

What else we're looking at

• Detailed returns for all 11 markets and sectors following a surge in copper
• With all the retail call buying, Gamma Exposure is once again at an extreme level
• There has been a historic leap in leverage
• Breadth among gold mining stocks seems to be at a make-or-break level
• The Stock/Bond Ratio is at an extreme level just as seasonality for both assets hits an interesting point

Sentiment from other perspectives

Small stocks are bigly expensive. Thanks to their historic rise in recent months, the valuation of small-cap stocks exceeds other factors and sectors by a factor of 2. Source: Wall Street Journal

Oil is getting expensive, too. Traders keep pushing energy commodities higher, so much so that the 14-day Relative Strength Index on crude oil just registered its highest reading in 30 years. Source: Bloomberg TV

That's helping push commodity indexes higher. The Bloomberg Commodity Index just had one of its best days ever, on top of a string of good days, as sentiment toward commodities swing from "they're the worst asset class in history" to "we're entering a new commodity supercycle." LOL, people never change.  Source: Bloomberg TV