Watch This Copper Price

Is the red metal finally in the black?

Three-month copper futures on the London Metal Exchange are up more than 3 percent over the past four trading days, heading toward their longest rising streak since October. Hedge funds' net short position in Chicago copper futures shrank last week to the lowest level since November, suggesting they're getting more nervous about betting prices are going to fall.

You can ignore all that stuff, though. Market prices and positions gyrate from week to week. If you really want to know where things are going, look at the prices that copper producers and traders are prepared to pay for long-term access to ore.

Sumitomo Metal on Monday paid Freeport-McMoRan $1 billion for a 13 percent stake in Morenci, a pit in Arizona that produces about 900 million pounds of copper a year. Spread over a 10-year investment horizon, it's getting its hands on about 1.17 billion pounds of metal for about 85 cents a pound.