Final Thoughts

October 19, 2016

One of my habits when writing this newsletter is to hold my Final Thoughts until after the vast majority if not the entire newsletter is complete. At that point I try to absorb what has transpired through the day and many times that day flows well into the evening. I think this is one of the differences between what Steel Market Update does and what happens at other periodicals.

This evening Jack Marshall of Crunchrisk, LLC and the author of this evening’s hot rolled futures article, spoke with me about the change in the HRC futures market over the past week. We went from there being too many sellers and not enough buyers to too many buyers and no sellers. Something has changed. Something to watch.

This evening I traded texts with a large service center that is active in the futures market and their comment was “demand is bad” which is not an endorsement for higher prices anytime soon…

I became aware this evening that Essar and Cargill have teamed up regarding a “structured load” or potential bid on US Steel Canada. I will work more on this story in the morning to see if we can understand exactly what is happening and any impact that it might have on the USSC operations.

I don’t know about you but I am glad the presidential debates are over and we have less than 3 weeks to the election. When we held our 6th Steel Summit at the end of August we did a straw poll of attendees using our App to see how many were Trump vs. Clinton supporters. At that time 48 percent of those voting (148 responses) were Donald Trump supporters, 22 percent were Clinton supporters and the balance were either other or didn’t care. I am curious how the results may have changed over the past couple of months…?

As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, Publisher