New York, February 4, 2026, 20:48 EST — Market closed
- FCX slid 4.35% on Wednesday to $61.86, reversing part of Tuesday’s 6.44% jump.
- Copper prices have been volatile since late January, keeping big miners sensitive to headlines and macro data.
- Traders are watching Thursday’s JOLTS release and next week’s delayed U.S. jobs report for fresh direction.
Freeport-McMoRan shares fell 4.35% on Wednesday to close at $61.86, snapping a two-day winning streak as trading volume ran above its recent average. The copper producer lagged the broader market and peers such as Newmont, with the Dow up 0.53% and the S&P 500 down 0.51%.
The drop followed a strong session a day earlier, when Freeport jumped 6.44% to $64.67 even as the broader market fell. The two-day swing has left the stock still not far from a 52-week high set on Jan. 29.
Copper has been swinging since a late-January surge, and that matters for Freeport’s earnings power because the shares often trade as a high-beta read on the metal. Macquarie analyst Alice Fox said the rally had been “pushed up by investors crowding into the market,” while StoneX analyst Natalie Scott-Gray said fundamentals “certainly do not support copper at current levels.” Mining Weekly
On the company’s investor site, COMEX copper — the main U.S. copper futures contract — last settled at $6.06 a pound on Feb. 3, up 4.5% on the day. The same page showed Freeport’s stock closing Wednesday with volume of about 31.8 million shares.
Copper was last trading around $5.92 a pound on Thursday, after hitting an all-time high of $6.58 in January, according to Trading Economics. Moves that size tend to feed straight into expectations for miners’ cash flows and capital spending.
Freeport, the world’s largest publicly traded copper producer, reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter profit last month even as output fell after an accident at its Grasberg mine in Indonesia killed seven workers. “The Grasberg incident was humbling, but our team has risen to the challenge and is dedicated to safely and sustainably restoring our operations,” CEO Kathleen Quirk said on a call; the company said it expects about 85% of production at Grasberg to be back online by the second half of 2026. Reuters
Macro risk is also back in the frame. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said the January employment report will be released on Feb. 11 after a short government shutdown delayed it, and the January CPI report is now due Feb. 13; a delayed JOLTS openings report for December is scheduled for Thursday.
But the setup cuts both ways. If copper’s pullback deepens on soft demand or if production recoveries take longer than expected, the stock’s leverage can work in reverse, and the recent high-volume swings can persist.
For Thursday’s U.S. session, traders will watch whether FCX can hold the $60 area while copper futures find direction. The next clear macro catalyst date is Feb. 11, when the Labor Department is scheduled to publish the January employment report.
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