The base metals were all mired in the red on Wednesday. Copper sagged from the gitgo and, despite a late morning attempt at a rally, finished at its intraday low of $1.7714/lb., down more than 16¾ cents.

Nickel had a very sharp late morning rally, pushing it well into positive territory, but it crashed equally hard, closing just off its intraday low at $5.1929/lb., down 20¾ cents. Zinc rallied several times, but they were just blips in a steady downtrend that took it to $0.505/lb., down 2¾ cents. Aluminum moved modestly lower, ending at $0.9122/lb., down more than a penny, while lead was weak, shedding almost two cents to $0.6677/lb.

Copper led the industrial metals lower yesterday, as Tuesday’s positive market sentiment dissipated in a big hurry. Or perhaps the euphoria of a particularly exciting election day just wore off.

“Now that the election is over, the focus is going to go back to the economic data and the outlook for demand,” said Matthew Zeman, a trader at LaSalle Futures Group in Chicago.

In that regard, the grim jobs data surely played in. “The ADP employment number looked horrible for the economic outlook,” Zeman said. “Until we see some signs of life in the economy, copper is going to struggle.”

Nor is there much that’s encouraging coming out of China.

“Spot import trade is still slow-moving and there isn’t much activity going on,” said a source from Beijing Antaike, the state-run nonferrous information provider. “I expect recent price rebound is only short-term and prices are likely to stay weak.”

Beijing Antaike has already revised down China’s likely copper consumption for 2008 to 4.9 million metric tons, as compared with a previous forecast of 5 million. “Domestic consumption in China is likely to stay weak this year,” they said.

But Alberto Bernal, of Bulltick Capital Markets in Miami, was more upbeat, saying that, “Nobody is expecting growth to be even close to what it was in the past, but it would be illogical to argue we’ll have a collapse in Chinese demand … All of these commodities have fallen like crazy in a way that’s ridiculous. There’s been some real overshooting and the most-likely scenario is that prices could rebound from here.”

Source: Base Metals Weak