NEW YORK, January 19, 2026, 14:02 EST — The market has closed.
Basic materials stocks reopen Tuesday in the U.S. with a mixed picture, after gold and silver hit record highs on safe-haven buying sparked by President Donald Trump’s newest tariff threat related to Greenland. The Materials Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLB) ended last week down 0.57% at $48.68. U.S. cash equity markets were closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 1
Why it matters now: materials stocks are caught between growth hopes and inflation fears, making them sensitive to metal price shifts. Tariff discussions cut both ways — they might boost bullion and miners briefly, but also risk dampening trade and weakening industrial demand.
XLB is an ETF tracking the Materials Select Sector Index, part of the S&P 500 covering chemicals, metals and mining, paper and forest products, containers and packaging, plus construction materials. This blend means the fund is sensitive to safe-haven flows into precious metals as well as demand from China, the top consumer of many industrial metals. 2
Spot gold surged 1.7% to $4,672.49 an ounce, briefly climbing as high as $4,689.39, according to Reuters. Silver followed suit, jumping 5% to $94.41 after reaching $94.61. Linh Tran, senior market analyst at XS.com, noted, “When institutional and policy risks resurface, markets tend to react swiftly by reallocating toward safe-haven assets.” 3
Copper, often seen as a barometer for global economic health, showed mixed signals. The most-active Shanghai copper contract dipped 0.37% to 101,490 yuan per metric ton. At the same time, the London Metal Exchange’s three-month benchmark copper climbed 1.16% to $12,951 a ton. Meanwhile, the Yangshan copper premium — an indicator of China’s appetite for imported copper — dropped to $32 a ton on Friday, according to the report. 4
China’s regulators have thrown a new challenge at metals traders. The country’s securities watchdog is now requiring brokers to pull client-dedicated servers out of exchange-run data centers. This move targets high-frequency trading — that rapid, algorithm-driven style that profits from tiny price shifts — and could dampen speculative volatility. “They do want to keep the markets focused on investment, as opposed to speculation,” said Shane Oliver, AMP’s chief economist. 5
During the final U.S. session, copper giant Freeport-McMoRan dropped 2.1%, and chemicals company Dow slipped 1.4%. Gold miner Newmont saw little movement. Industrial gases firm Linde declined 0.3%, while the SPDR S&P Metals & Mining ETF (XME) nudged up 0.4%. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) fell 0.1%.
The trade-off isn’t clean. Should tariff threats ease or stall, safe-haven buying could evaporate fast, pulling down bullion-linked stocks while industrial metals remain vulnerable to sluggish end-user demand. Yet if growth concerns deepen, cyclical materials would probably suffer, even if gold holds firm.
All eyes now turn to the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting on January 27-28. Traders in materials will be tracking the dollar, real yields, and any changes to the rate trajectory that might ripple through to metals prices. 6
