Elliott fires competition claim at LME over 2022 nickel cancellations

Elliott Investment Management has filed a fresh lawsuit against the London Metal Exchange, this time under UK competition law — a pivot that tells you something about how much money it believes was erased on March 8, 2022.

That day, nickel prices moved from roughly $30,000 per metric ton to above $100,000 in hours. The LME suspended trading and then cancelled every trade executed that morning. The annulled transactions carried approximately $12 billion in notional value. Elliott, which had been on the winning side, originally sought around $456 million in damages through judicial review. The UK High Court rejected that claim in November 2023. The Court of Appeal upheld the rejection. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in January 2025. AQR and DRW, which had filed parallel cases, withdrew after watching Elliott exhaust the route.

What Elliott is doing now is not persistence for its own sake. It is a different legal theory entirely. The first case argued the LME lacked authority to cancel trades. That argument failed at every level. The new case argues that what the LME did — and how it did it — violated UK competition rules. The distinction matters because competition claims carry their own procedural framework and their own remedies, and because the Financial Conduct Authority handed Elliott something useful in March 2025: a £9.2 million fine against the LME for its handling of the crisis. That was the FCA's first enforcement action against a UK exchange. Elliott has indicated it is reviewing those findings.

Here is where I part company with the straightforward reading of this story. The conventional view is that this is a long-shot afterthought — a hedge fund rummaging through the statute book after losing cleanly on the merits. I don't think that's where this lands. The FCA penalty establishes, on the public record, that the LME's conduct fell below the standard a regulator would accept. A competition claim does not need to re-litigate whether the cancellations were lawful. It needs to establish whether market power was exercised in a way that harmed participants who had no recourse. Those are different questions, and the courts that ruled in 2023 and 2024 did not answer them.

HKEX, which acquired the LME in 2012, is named as a co-defendant. Whatever the legal outcome, the exchange group is now carrying litigation exposure across multiple theories on a crisis that is four years old and still not resolved. That has a cost that doesn't appear on a balance sheet until it does.

I have watched institutions treat a first legal defeat as proof the claim was wrong. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is proof the claim was wrong on that particular legal ground, and the underlying grievance is still alive. Elliott's original filing was not frivolous — it was resolved on a narrow point about LME authority, not on whether $456 million in legitimate trade profits were erased. The competition route keeps that underlying question open.