Final Thoughts

Correction: CME HRC settlement number for January was $389 per ton, not $398 per ton as we mistakenly identified in our monthly analysis table published in our Sunday evening edition. Unlike Platts and our own SMU hot rolled index, the index used by CME had hot rolled prices dropping by $7 per ton during one of their weekly posts. All of the indexes followed by SMU (Platts, SteelBenchmarker and SMU) had HRC prices rising during the entire month of January. If you have any questions you can contact the CME Group or your bank or broker (such as Andre Marshall or Spencer Johnson) for more details.

We are in the middle of a flat rolled steel market trends analysis. We will begin reporting the results of our analysis which comes from the questionnaire we invite up to 600 people representing over 550 companies to complete. Our Premium members will have access to a Power Point presentation with a great deal of the results on Friday of this week (we post it on our website along with past presentations). Those of you trialing our newsletter will also have access to the presentation which can be found under the Analysis tab (after you are logged into the website).