When price stops working
The most dangerous assumption in commodity investing is that scarcity resolves through price.
In a normally functioning market, that assumption holds. Supply tightens, prices rise, new production comes online, equilibrium restores. The mechanism is elegant and, for most of financial history, reliable.
Critical minerals are breaking it.
The antimony proof of concept
In September 2024, China imposed export controls on antimony. What followed was not a price adjustment — it was a repricing. Spot levels moved from approximately $9,000 per metric ton in December 2023 to over $60,000 by March 2025. A 560% increase in fifteen months.
Markets do not move that way in response to marginal tightening. They move that way when a prior equilibrium is revealed to have been fundamentally wrong.
What the antimony market discovered was not a new shortage. It discovered the absence of something it had assumed was there: accessible supply. China controlled roughly 60% of mine production — but approximately 74% of refining capacity. Russia, which had risen to a comparable share of output, had become largely unreachable to Western buyers. In practical terms, the majority of global supply had already moved outside the reachable system. The market simply had not priced that reality.
Price cannot solve absence. It can only solve scarcity.
The structural shift already underway
Antimony is not an anomaly. It is a template.
Across critical minerals markets — tungsten, graphite, rare earth elements, gallium, germanium — the same architecture is already in place: supply that is geographically concentrated, processing that is operationally centralized, and availability that depends increasingly on geopolitical alignment rather than purchasing power.
The post-Cold War model assumed that global integration and cost optimization were durable. That model is being replaced by one in which access is mediated by control over processing infrastructure and political positioning. This transition is not theoretical. It is already determining outcomes.
What this means for investment
The relevant risk in critical minerals is not traditional volatility. It is discontinuity.
Prices can remain suppressed for extended periods in systems that are structurally imbalanced — because the imbalance is not visible until a policy action forces it into the open. When that happens, adjustment is abrupt and asymmetric. Antimony moved from levels that rendered Western production uneconomic to levels that generated extraordinary margins in less than two years. This was not a cycle. It was a correction of a mis-specification that had persisted for decades.
The investment framework this demands is different from conventional commodity analysis. The questions that matter are not about supply-demand balances in the next quarter. They are about processing control, strategic buffer capacity, geopolitical alignment, and the distance between geological resources and operational access.
Habemus applies this framework across the critical minerals complex — identifying the markets where structural imbalances have not yet been priced, and positioning ahead of the corrections that follow.
The full structural analysis of the antimony market — including production concentration metrics, strategic stockpile dynamics, and corporate-level transmission of the shock — is available at alejandra-giraldo.com/insights/the-antimony-repricing
This note is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.