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    Shorter commodity cycles reshaping trading: McKinsey takeaways for mine planners

    March 4, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    Shorter commodity cycles reshaping trading: McKinsey takeaways for mine planners

    First reported on MINING.com

    30 Second Briefing

    Shorter, more frequent commodity volatility cycles are eroding supercycle-based trading models and concentrating value among firms with advanced AI and strong control of physical flows, with sector-wide trading revenues at $69 billion in 2025, roughly double pre-pandemic levels. McKinsey estimates around $20 billion of optimisation value remains untapped in oil and gas products, and early agentic AI deployments are delivering 50–60% efficiency gains in support functions by automating post-trade operations and compressing deal cycles. In a January 2026 survey of 150 professionals, 49% favoured partnership-led expansion of trading capabilities, rising to 78% in Asia and 80% in the US, with metals, mining, oil and gas targeted for the largest investment increases.

    Technical Brief

    • Trading revenues slipped from $72 billion in 2024 to $69 billion in 2025 across commodities.
    • Coverage spans power, gas, metals and mining, agriculture, oil and products, and liquefied natural gas.
    • Value capture is consolidating into a smaller cohort of firms with advanced trading capabilities and capital access.
    • Shorter volatility cycles are described as creating a “permanent divergence” between capability-rich and lagging organisations.
    • Agentic AI is specifically credited with automating post-trade operations and compressing digital workflow bottlenecks.
    • Survey base comprised more than 150 commodity trading professionals polled in January 2026 across global regions.
    • Asia shows 78% preference for partnership-led trading expansion, compared with 80% in the United States.
    • Metals and mining, plus oil and gas, are singled out as priority sectors for trading capability investment growth.

    Our Take

    The $1 billion Equinox Gold sale of Brazilian gold assets to CMOC sits within a Latin American M&A wave our database tracks at roughly three-quarters of global mining deal value in the first three quarters of 2025, signalling that portfolio reshaping in gold and copper is increasingly being executed via asset swaps and carve-outs rather than greenfield builds.

    McKinsey & Company’s role in both this trading-cycle analysis and earlier work on mining productivity stagnation (noted in our December 2025 coverage) suggests that shorter commodity cycles in copper, lithium and other critical minerals are likely to collide with already weak productivity, putting extra pressure on operators to use trading and optimisation desks as a core value lever rather than a side activity.

    With 78–80% of surveyed trading professionals in Asia and the US favouring partnerships, miners like BHP and gold producers exposed to copper and battery metals are likely to find more receptive counterparties for JV-style marketing and offtake structures, especially in regions such as Latin America and Africa that dominate recent M&A flows in our coverage.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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