Best Copper ETF and Copper Miners ETFs Ranked by Fees

The best copper ETF for owning copper miners is the Sprott Copper Miners ETF (COPP), which was 93.0% copper-first miners on October 22, 2026, or its sister fund COPJ at 97.7% if you want smaller producers and developers. The Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX) is the biggest and the best known, but only 67.1% of it is companies whose main business is copper; BHP, Glencore and other diversified majors fill most of the rest. For the copper price itself rather than miners, CPER holds copper futures. Vanguard, Schwab and Fidelity do not sell a copper ETF.

So "best" depends on what you think you are buying. Five US-listed ETFs hold copper mining stocks, and their fees sit between 0.35% and 0.75%. What they hold varies far more. We sorted every holding of every fund by what the company mainly sells, and the share that is actually copper-first runs from 58% to almost 98%. Below, each fund is ranked twice: by expense ratio, and by what it costs for each $100 of copper miners you actually get.

Expense ratios come from each fund's page or summary prospectus. Holdings come from the issuers' own files for COPX, COPP, COPJ and COPA, all dated October 22, 2026. The iShares website could not be read, so ICOP holdings are from its latest SEC holdings filing, dated June 30, 2026. We make index construction and backtesting software; we do not sell funds or give investment advice.

Best copper ETFs ranked by expense ratio

COPX is one of the most expensive funds and by far the largest. At $6.67 billion it holds roughly eight times the other four combined, and it is the only one of the five where trading volume and fund closure are rarely a worry. COPA is the cheapest, but at $11.6 million it is tiny, and small thematic funds close often. A closure forces a sale on the fund's date rather than yours, which can hand you a taxable gain in a year you did not plan for. COPP's 0.65% management fee rises to 0.66% once you count the fees of the physical copper trust it owns.

What is the cheapest copper ETF?

The cheapest copper ETF by expense ratio is Themes Copper Miners (COPA) at 0.35% a year, followed by iShares Copper and Metals Mining (ICOP) at 0.47%. COPX and COPP both charge 0.65% and COPJ 0.75%. Measured per $100 of copper-first miners you actually own, COPA is still cheapest at $0.55, but COPP moves to second at $0.70 and COPX falls to last at $0.97.

Copper ETFs ranked by fee per $100 of real copper miners

The expense ratio tells you what you pay on the whole fund. It does not tell you what you pay for the copper. Divide the fee by the share of the fund that sits in copper-first companies and you get the yearly cost of each $100 of copper mining exposure. That is our arithmetic, not a figure any issuer publishes.

Two things change when you rank this way. ICOP's low headline fee stops looking like a bargain: in its June 30 filing it held BHP, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, Vale and Glencore at 28.9% combined, plus gold miners Evolution, Barrick and Newmont at 12.1%, so its copper costs more than COPP's. And COPX, the default choice for most investors, becomes the most expensive way to own copper miners, because about a third of it is iron ore, coal, zinc, smelting and gold.

COPA's first place comes with a footnote. Besides its small size, 14.1% of it sits in companies that are neither copper miners nor diversified miners, such as a Chinese copper foil maker at 3.1%, and 15.3% is in China-controlled companies. COPX is similar on China at 14.7%. COPP holds 2.2% and COPJ almost none. Some of our classifications are judgment calls; Teck is the largest, counted as copper-first because copper was 61.5% of its 2025 revenue. Move Teck out and COPX's cost per $100 of copper rises to $1.06.

Best copper ETF for pure copper miners

If you want a fund that is copper and nothing else, the choice is between Sprott's two. COPP is the larger copper producers: Freeport-McMoRan, Teck, Antofagasta, Southern Copper, Hudbay, KGHM, Lundin Mining and First Quantum, plus 5.5% in the Sprott Physical Copper Trust. COPJ is the small end of the industry, led by Minsur, Ero Copper, Trekor Metals (Taseko Mines until its rename in June 2026), Atalaya and Ivanhoe Electric, with dozens of developers below them.

The catch with COPP is concentration. Freeport-McMoRan alone was 25.0% of the fund on October 22 and Teck 10.5%, and the ten largest holdings were 74.9%. Buying COPP is partly a bet on Freeport's Grasberg and Arizona mines. COPJ spreads its money more evenly, with a top ten of 42.5%, but its companies are smaller, younger and swing harder, and it is more expensive at 0.75%.

COPX vs COPP

COPX and COPP charge the same 0.65%, so the difference is what they hold. COPP is 93.0% copper-first and heavily weighted to the biggest names. COPX is 67.1% copper-first and spreads 40 stocks in roughly equal slices, so no single company is much over 5.7%, but a quarter of it is diversified majors. The two overlap by 55.3%, measured as the sum of the smaller weight in each shared stock. Pick COPP if copper purity matters most and you are comfortable with a quarter in Freeport. Pick COPX if you want spread and the liquidity of a $6.67 billion fund.

COPX vs ICOP

ICOP is 0.18 points cheaper, which is $18 a year on $10,000. In exchange it holds more of what a copper buyer usually did not ask for: 28.9% diversified majors against 25.9% in COPX, and 12.1% gold miners against 4.9%. Its largest holding in the June 30 filing was BHP at 8.2%. COPX and ICOP overlap by 55.1%. If you think of copper miners as a commodity bet, COPX is the closer match. If you want broad metals mining with a copper tilt, ICOP is cheaper and says so in its name.

COPX vs CPER

These are different products. COPX owns mining companies; CPER, the United States Copper Index Fund, owns COMEX copper futures and no stocks. CPER charges a 0.65% management fee, and its total expenses ran about 0.78% a year in the first half of 2026 according to its quarterly report. Miners usually move more than the metal in both directions because their profits are the copper price minus a fixed cost base, and they carry company risks the metal does not: strikes, mine accidents, royalty fights, debt. CPER carries futures roll costs instead, and as a commodity pool it sends a Schedule K-1 at tax time, which some investors would rather avoid.

Does Vanguard have a copper ETF?

No. Vanguard does not offer a copper ETF or a copper miners fund, and neither do Schwab or Fidelity; an SEC filing search and a web search on October 23, 2026 turned up none. Vanguard's broad materials fund holds some copper exposure through Freeport-McMoRan, the only copper company in the S&P 500, but chemicals, building materials and packaging companies make up most of it. A Vanguard customer who wants copper can buy COPX, COPP, COPJ, ICOP or CPER in a Vanguard Brokerage account, or buy the copper stocks themselves.

When is owning the stocks cheaper than a copper ETF?

A fund fee grows with your balance. Software and a broker do not. At 0.65%, COPX costs $650 a year on $100,000 and $1,300 on $200,000, every year. Holding the copper producers directly costs nothing in fees once the shares are bought, and you decide the weights, including how much Freeport you want and whether BHP and the gold-heavy miners belong at all. The US-listed set is smaller than the global industry but covers the largest producers in the Americas: Freeport-McMoRan, Southern Copper, Teck, Hudbay and Ero Copper, with Ivanhoe Electric as a developer and BHP, Rio Tinto and Vale if you want the majors.

Holding the shares also lets you take tax losses one stock at a time, and miners give plenty of chances. A single producer can drop a third on a mine accident, a strike or a guidance cut while the rest of the group holds. Miners also gap hard at the open on copper price moves and quarterly results, and if you trade those moves rather than hold through them, a real-time scanner for stocks gapping at the open shows you which names are moving before you act. In your own basket you can sell the one that fell for a loss and keep the rest, which a fund does not let you do. Check the 30 day window with the wash sale calculator before you buy it back.

What you give up is the upkeep and the foreign miners. Antofagasta, Glencore, First Quantum, Lundin Mining, KGHM and the Chinese producers are not listed in New York, so many people add COPX or COPJ as a single line to cover them. That is the part worth testing before you put money in. On our build your own copper miners stocks index page you can pick the companies and weights, backtest the basket against COPX and the S&P 500 over real market history, and track it daily before you buy anything. If you also want the battery metals, the lithium ETF alternative page sorts those funds the same way, and our best lithium ETF ranking uses the same fee per exposure method.

How we built these numbers

We downloaded each fund's full holdings file and sorted every position into one of four groups by the company's main business: copper-first miners, developers and smelters; diversified majors that own big copper mines but earn most of their money elsewhere; gold and silver miners; and everything else, including royalty companies, processors, other funds and cash. Fee per $100 of copper is the expense ratio divided by the copper-first share. Overlap is the sum, across shared stocks, of the smaller weight in the two funds.

Several companies could reasonably sit in another group, and we list them so you can disagree. Teck, Aurubis (a smelter and recycler), Minsur and Grupo Mexico are counted as copper. Zijin and Sumitomo Metal Mining are counted as diversified, and China Gold International as gold. Taking every borderline name out of the copper group lowers COPX to 58.7%, COPP to 78.4%, COPJ to 84.2%, ICOP to 43.4% and COPA to 56.3%, but the ranking by fee per $100 of copper barely moves: COPA, COPP and COPJ stay ahead of COPX. Holdings and fees change, so confirm them on each fund's page before you buy.