The United States has banned imports of aluminum, copper and nickel from Russia to the London Metal Exchange (LME) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. However, this is unlikely to prevent the Russian Federation from selling its metals, since sanctions do not prevent individuals and legal entities who are not US citizens from buying Russian copper, nickel or aluminum. Metals trading, as a rule, takes place between mining companies and trainers.  

The Iranian rial has updated its historical low against the dollar against the background of the conflict with Israel. On Saturday, April 13, Iran launched an attack on Israel with dozens of drones and ballistic missiles. The country also said it would give a «mirror response» to any actions by Washington against Tehran coming from any country in the world.

Biden did not make a statement on Iran/Israel in order to prevent an escalation of the situation. Meanwhile, the WSJ, citing officials from the United States and other Western countries, writes that Israel's retaliatory attack on Iran may take place today. 

Apple has lost the title of leader in the number of smartphones produced. Now Samsung has regained this niche, occupied for 12 years until 2023. The share of the South Korean company in the global market in the 1st quarter of 2024 was 20.8%. Apple has 17.3%. Chinese Xiaomi is in third place with 14.1%.

Investments in industrial metals turned out to be more profitable than in gold. According to RIA, the return on investment in indium and tin over the past year has been almost twice as high as in gold. Prices for these metals increased by 35.5% and 33.5%, respectively. Gold rose in price by only 18.3%. Lithium and rhodium turned out to be the worst metals over the past 12 months: minus 44% and 41%.

The number of DDoS attacks in Russia has tripled. 512 hacking attacks have been carried out on the Russian infrastructure since the beginning of the year alone. This is almost three times more than in the whole of 2023. Analysts explain this by the efforts of foreign hackers to prevent Russia from holding presidential elections.