Almost home

It looks like Mick Davis is winning his $19bn bet on high metal prices. That’s the best interpretation of the market’s warm welcome to the announcement of a $5.5bn rights issue from Xstrata, which Davis runs. The shares traded up 4% on Tuesday morning. There were some doubters in July, when Davis came out on top of a bidding war for Falconbridge, a Canadian miner. The winning price was more than twice what Xstrata had paid for its first 20%, acquired less than a year earlier. The financing incl...