The prevailing opinion was that lithium would stay expensive or go up even more. The price also has not stabilized and may well continue to drop; this is an in-progress update.
Prevailing opinion from whom? Certainly nobody who understands how commodity markets work.
This is all econ 101 level effects, and yet there have been so many articles in the past few years where writers are shocked at what is happening to the prices this week. Or even dumber ones where they project out battery production to 2030 and then compare that to the lithium market today and come to the conclusion that we will never be able to electrify because the lithium market isn't big enough.
I'm personally excited for the point a few years from now when all of the battery plants are online and they overshoot demand and the prices crater. It will be a short but glorious golden age for grid storage, EV startups, and so on until some of the companies go under and others consolidate and the prices come back up to a more sustainable level.
A quick increase shortly followed by a quick decrease of about the same size is a completely different news from a quick decrease without the previous increase.
The article is quite clear on what happened, and interesting too. But the headline is clickbaity.
I think the difference is in what a drop is in regards to. A drop of a well established price indicates something has fundamentally changed to make the price go down. A drop from the peak of a large increase that is still far above the previous well established price looks more like something has fundamentally changed to make the price go up, but markets over estimated how much the price would increase. The difference is that the new price, assuming it becomes the new well established price, is lower in one situation and higher in the other. A title implying the former case when it is the latter might fall under the scope of clickbait.
If the price is swinging up and down constantly and there is no well established price, then that is yet another situation which seems different from the previous two and the title might be better off capturing the unsteady nature of the price.
If I make a major story that "X happened three times this year" without pointing out in the title that the historic numbers of X is 2 to 4 each year, it can be treated as a dishonest implication of some trend that doesn't exist. We know many will only read headlines and will not question the implications. This is something worth calling out even when it is over trivial matters to prevent it from being used for more serious matters.
> A drop of a well established price indicates something has fundamentally changed to make the price go down.
No it doesn't. Look at any commodity futures prices: they swing wildly for no apparent reason. Fundamentals are only loosely connected to today's prices.
