Metal market perceptions — a special capacity

A distinction is highlighted in the saying: He sees but does not perceive. There’s the rub. Perceptions, good or poor, assist in changing the prices of metals and often their availability. They are that big. Perceptions defy logic.

One example is seen when a sizeable investor, trader or major industrial consumer perceives there will be a shortage of, say, copper in the immediate future. The investor goes long; that is, buys more holdings of that metal because such a constraint would push the price up.

The industrial consumer reacts to such a perception by increasing his purchases rather than risking his plant’s feedstock by being caught short. Some others do the same and often panic spreads like a firestorm and the price rockets skyward. Prices affected

Perceptions started it and affect mining companies because of the effect on prices. Other perceptions push prices down.

When our feelings are the most vivid, our perceptions are the most piercing, even if misguided and unsuccessful.

Perception is distinguished from reasoning, mere facts, simple sensation, conception or imagination, as well as from judgment or plain interference. It shows disdain in its shutting out or submerging a lot of rational approaches or scientific discipline.

It may be described as direct or intuitive cognition or grasp, a special capacity for comprehension, winking out the buried truth in a special situation. It is much more than a tendency to draw sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

In older societies, as in the long Celtic iron pioneering period in Ireland, Britain and Gaul, perceptions were admired and deliberately aimed at through vigorous oral training of up to 20 years.

Such an approach would invite chortling ridicule from the modern general public. Yet, at the same time, our society pours rewards on those with exceptionally developed keen perceptive powers — what the Irish call “the second sight” — who become rich in stock and metal trading in New York, Chicago, Toronto, etc. Dealing edge

Such gifted people have an edge over ordinary dealers who, in honing their knowledge and ability, are confined to mundane things such as continuous study of charts covering supply, demand, price, etc., in the past and extrapolating from that data to produce a so-called “forecast.” It is, however, the perceptive few who get richer.

Even in our sophisticated computer-assisted state, we sometimes deliberately embrace or indulge in a perception challenge, as sketched by Samuel Butler more than 300 years ago:

Doubtless the pleasure

is as great

Of being cheated,

as to cheat.

As lookers-on feel

most delight,

That least perceive

a juggler’s sleight,

And still the less

they understand,

The more th’admire

his sleight of hand.

An audience may not understand a play, but feels quite willing to criticize, based on its perceptions.

Misguided perceptions are rife, as in the literary and environmental world’s sneers at mining and metals in vivid phrases such as “the snakeskin-titles of mining claims” and “saint-seducing gold.” Each one of us harbors quite erroneous perceptions on a variety of subjects, of course.

Some say that, in general, women are more perceptive than men. Well now, that would make for a really dandy discussion, which may be desirable vis-a-vis the growing power of women in mining — or is it just intuition? Anyone brave enough to comment?

A metals refinery owner friend of mine recently wrote a fascinating series of articles on women in metals. It had to stop because a United States government agency ruled it was clear discrimination favoring one sex. Would we be permitted to write such a series in Canada, I wonder?005 T. P. (Tom) Mohide, a former president of the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, served as a director of mining resources with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources prior to his retirement in 1986.

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