Investing in basic materials stocks often requires looking around corners into an opaque future. That’s been the case for shareholders of Freeport-McMoRan Inc. (NYSE: FCX). For the last four years, the stock has been a better trade than it has been an investment. You can blame much of the volatility in FCX stock on the demand for copper.
Copper is a critical metal that is needed for many renewable energy applications such as electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, and wind turbines. But it’s also a key metal that will be needed in the power-hungry data centers that are needed to fuel the demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
