Is a new big wave starting?

Prices are rising, so why does the wave look like it is at the bottom?

The site shows two things that are easy to confuse. One is the actual price. The other is the 30-year wave, which is the price with ordinary ups and downs of a few years smoothed away. When prices jump, the actual price moves at once, but the wave line barely moves: from the data so far, the filter cannot tell a lasting rise from a short one, so it treats the new rise as a short one.

The rise from the 2020 low is easier to read in two parts, measured against the year before the pandemic:

1. 2020–2025: mostly a recovery

   Prices overall only got back to where they were before the pandemic (×0.99 of 2019; energy ×0.92). The exceptions were precious metals (×1.91) and, less so, metals (×1.13), which were already well above.

2. Since 2026: a rise beyond the recovery

   By Aug 2026 prices overall were ×1.17 of 2019, with energy, metals and precious metals all higher. This is the part that could be the start of a big wave, but it is only 8 months old and is not yet in the annual index that the wave line is drawn from.

So the rise from the low is not simply a short-term event separate from the big trend. The recovery part was a short-term move; the new part is too young to classify. If prices stay high for several more years, the orange line will be redrawn upwards, as happened after 2005. If they fall back, it will stay where it is.

The index is Jacks’s (1975 production weights, so energy weighs heavily) and ends in 2025. The World Bank monthly figures further down run to Aug 2026 and weight commodities differently, so the numbers differ a little.

The same situation, before

Years in which prices had risen at least 30% from a low within the previous six years, yet the wave line drawn at the time still showed it near or below normal. What happened next?

In the 1930s prices were bouncing back from the Great Depression, and the wave that followed was small. In the 1970s and 2000s the rise kept going and became a big wave. In the two big waves, prices still had further to go (×1.2–1.4 more on this index before the peak, in 1981 and 2011). Today’s rise is also partly a bounce from a crash (the pandemic) and is smaller so far than any of the three. Two out of three is not a forecast; it only shows that both outcomes have happened from a position like today’s.

Rules: the low is the cheapest year in the previous six (at least three years back); the wave as seen then is drawn with data up to that year only; consecutive years are grouped and the one with the biggest rise is shown; a big wave means the wave rose more than 20% above normal within ten years (measured with today’s data).

Compared with the start of the 2000s wave

The 2000s wave (the fourth, the China boom) and today’s rise both began after a crisis: the Asian and Russian crises in 1998–99, the pandemic in 2020. So we compare each with the year before its crisis (1997 and 2019), at the same point: 6 years 4 months after the crisis low. The 2000s wave did not stop there; it went on until 2008–11, so the table also shows how far it finally went.

The 2000s wave kept rising after this point: prices overall went from ×1.55 to ×3.12 of 1997 by Jun 2008, and in the end 25 of 26 commodities rose 20% or more. For today’s rise to go as far, prices would have to climb about another ×2.7 from here.

In the 2000s the early rise was about oil and other energy, while farm goods were still falling. This time the leaders are gold, silver, tin and copper, plus coffee and cocoa; oil and most grains have barely moved, and iron ore, nickel and lead have fallen. By its peak in 2008–11, the 2000s wave had lifted almost everything. The same has not happened yet this time.

The four groups since 1990

Why we cannot tell yet

To say where a year sits in a 30-year wave, you need to see the years on both sides of it. For the latest years there is no after yet, so the reading is a guess that later data corrects. The chart shows how the wave looked at the time (dots) against how it looks now (black line).

The clearest case is 2005. Prices were already rising fast, yet the wave looked 4% below normal at the time. With later data, that year turned out to be +7%, on the way up. The same may be happening now: the 2025 reading (-3%) will move once the next years are known.

How expensive each commodity is today

Height in its history: the share of months since the data began (mostly 1960) when the price after inflation was lower than now. World Bank monthly prices, deflated by US CPI into Aug 2026 dollars.

People who say a new supercycle has begun

• 2005
  Citigroup (Alan Heap)

  China's industrialisation had launched a commodity supercycle lasting decades.

  Source: Heap 2005

• Jan 2022
  Goldman Sachs (Jeff Currie)

  "Extremely bullish" on commodities, in a supercycle that could last a decade.

  Source: MINING.COM, Jan 2022

• May 2026
  Jeff Currie (senior adviser, Carlyle)

  The supercycle is still in its early innings: capital spending has fallen since 2020 and inventories are thin just as demand picks up.

  Source: Kitco News, May 2026

What the data says so far: the rise since 2020 is about as broad as the start of the 2000s wave, but smaller overall and led by different commodities; on the long-run index the wave was still about at its normal level in 2025 (-3%), which is how Jacks reads it too ("likely near its trough"). The claim is neither proven nor ruled out. A few more years of data, and whether oil and grains join in, will decide it.

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