Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
September 30, 2016
When looking at hot rolled coil prices U.S. buyers need to remain aware of what is going on with the rest of the world. Prices in Europe are rising and as one trader put it to us on Friday of this past week, “The Turks aren’t idiots.” Prices for HRC in the Turkish market are around $450 per metric ton and they certainly do not want to get caught selling steel to the U.S. at below their home selling prices. What does this mean to U.S. prices? My opinion is whatever erosion we have in HRC prices is coming from domestic competitive pressures and not from cheap foreign steel.
Cold rolled and coated steels are different than hot rolled in that the U.S. mills have this wider than normal spread between HR and CR, galvanized/Galvalume base pricing. My opinion is we will see a tightening of the spread, but it may not necessarily get back to the more normal $100-$120 per ton. Hitting the low price foreign country (Vietnam) may help keep the spread between HR and CR/coated elevated. At this moment it is too early to tell. We also have to wait and see if other foreign steels (like Brazil and Russia) will be offered in larger volumes.
Just to reiterate our announcement from last week, our Steel 101 workshop for Memphis is sold out. For those attending you are going to have a special experience in many ways. We have an exceptional group of companies and individuals attending this workshop. We will announce our early 2017 workshop location and dates very soon.
For our Premium level members we will provide our Key Market Indicators in a special Premium issue tomorrow.
We will begin our early October flat rolled steel market trends survey first thing Monday morning. Invitations should go out around 8 AM ET.
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John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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I want to draw your attention to SMU’s monthly scrap market survey. It’s a premium feature that complements our long-running steel market survey. We’ve been running our scrap survey since late January. And over just that short time, it’s become a valuable way not only for us to assess where scrap prices might go but also to quantify some of the “fuzzy” indicators - like sentiment and flows - that help to put the price in context.
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