Percy Spencer was an engineer at Raytheon during WWII, specializing in radar systems. One day, while he was wandering in front of a magnetron, as one does, he noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket was melted. That would have made my mind go to “what inside of my body is this also melting???” But luckily for us, Percy’s mind wandered in a different direction, and 7 years later the first commercial microwave oven was sold. His total disregard for safety led to an invention that probably saved me from starving in my mid-20s.

Or take Alexander Fleming. That guy ran his lab with the same hygiene standards my son uses to run his bedroom. He came back from vacation to see that mold had invaded one of his bacteria experiments…and wiped them out. Ta-da, penicillin. This accident saved a couple hundred million lives and got him knighted.

While obviously less important than those examples, we’ve got another potential case of accidental brilliance going on as we speak. In Feb of 2025, the US announced a Section 232 investigation into copper - basically, investigating the merits of tariffs on copper for national security reasons. Since then, there have been a dizzying number of announcements, proclamations, and tweets - many self-contradicting - creating chaos in the market as everyone fruitlessly tries to figure out where the tariffs will ultimately land.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who imports copper as a critical input to your business. Copper is cheap to move, cheap to store. Your cost of capital is low. All-in, adding to your inventories is a drop in the bucket compared to what tariffs could cost you. Why wouldn’t you just stockpile it?

Stockpile it they have. As this saga has dragged and dragged with no clear resolution in sight, the stockpile has grown and grown. The chart below shows the picture. We now have coverage for roughly 9 months of imports if supply chains get disrupted:

In other words, we now (in some sense) have a US copper strategic reserve! Brilliant!

We’ve shifted from a world of positive-sum global trade arrangements to one of zero-sum trade protectionism. In that world, commodity stockpiles are prudent. While this one is…unique…in its implementation, we think it is just one of many more stockpiles to come across countries and across commodities, providing another tailwind to the asset class in portfolios with longer time horizons.