The great and good of the global metals industry gather for London Metal Exchange week — the flagship event for the industry.

With most base metal prices running way ahead of fundamentals, real and apparent demand unclear and leading economies at different stages of recovery or not, its a key time to take the temperature of banks, producers, consumers and funds involved in metals.

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After the Federal Reserve said last week it would buy about $1 trillion of long-term U.S. debt, copper rallied to price levels seen in November.  Other base metals followed higher. 

Technical analysts at RBC Capital Markets referred to current metal action as “jobbers markets and not trends,” warning bulls “to beware of getting married to their positions in these choppy and uncertain times.” Others chartists said they were looking for confirmation of the price rally from demand indicators and would not recommend buying metals until the had clearly turned bullish.

The only analyst I spoke with willing to set specific upside targets was Barclays Capital technical strategist MacNeil Curry. He thinks London Metal Exchange copper can reach $4,300 to $4,500 a tonne, with possible scope above $5,000 a tonne. Specifically, Curry said he sees initial targets at $4,366 to $4,547 a tonne. He called short-term support at a trendline and recent low of $3,725 and $3,671. A move below that area would signal a bigger decline than previously forecast.

While LME aluminum has come off a two-month peak, it was trading in a new higher range above $1,400 a tonne. Curry said, “the path of least resistance is still clearly higher given the bullish divergences and weekly momentum indicators and given the strength in other commodity metals.”

A definitive break above that level would add to evidence that aluminum had completed an eight-month downtrend, the Barclays analyst said.

Curry sees zinc, currently trading at $1,280 a tonne, getting dragged higher. But it would need to break above January 7 high at $1,365 to really take off. A breakout puts in sight the 200-day moving average at $1,445 a tonne.

“I think it’s going higher with copper, but it may take awhile,” he said.

Nearly 20 foreign correspondents showed up this week to a meeting at the Chilean Copper Commission (Cochilco) to hear the world’s top authority on copper give guidance on where prices were headed.

Maybe copper has not been the sexiest story.  But as a mining correspondent based in Santiago, it must be the first time I’ve attended a news conference where most of the reporters had absolutely no clue about the metal.

Maybe copper has been taken for granted here. For as the copper futures price halved in a matter of months, the news corps is suddenly very interested in a metal that is central to Chile’s economic future, accounting for over 50 percent of exports and the lion’s share of government revenue.

As a regular at the commission over the past three years, I can say most of the other correspondents had never before set foot in the Cochilco building in downtown Santiago.

“It’s that everybody wants to know where the economy is going,” one correspondent said when I asked if she was now covering copper.

Copper prices are falling due to slowing demand in a world economy where fewer cars are being built and construction activity is declining …  good for consumers perhaps but bad for producers and a worrisome indicator of the global economy.

High copper prices made possible Chile’s record government surpluses in recent years and also helped the government sock away $21 billion for a rainy day in sovereign wealth funds.

With signs of a slowdown in No. 1 consumer China, the destination for  much of Chile’s copper exports, the burning question for reporters here is whether copper has lost its sheen for good.

One of the unexpected findings from executives and analysts attending the CESCO and CRU copper conferences in Santiago, Chile: Women are better drivers than men in those house-sized trucks roaming surface mines around the world. They’re said to be more cautious and that reduces wear and tear on the 13 feet-high tires they rumble around on.

Watch this video uploaded to YouTube to see the monster-of-monster trucks in action.

The largest of these trucks, manufactured by Caterpillar, Komatsu of Japan and Germany’s Liebherr, can carry almost 350 tonnes. Each tire can cost up to $125,000 but they can easily be flattened by a fist-sized stone wedged in its treads.

To avoid blowing a tire, a mine might reduce the bucket load even when operating full-out to keep up with global copper demand. Light trucks will speed ahead of the big ones and radio in debris on the mine roadbed. “You get guys jumping out of vehicles throwing stones off the road,” one analyst told me.

More women are getting hired anyway and not just to drive trucks. With the copper industry booming, both tires and workers are in short supply. Copper prices are near records but so are operating costs.

Yet even in Australia, with its macho image, at one large mine, reportedly the truck drivers are 60 percent female and 40 percent male.  In the superstitious old days they said women were back luck at a mine. Today, it seems they’re a charm.