Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
August 27, 2018
Due to our conference, we will hold back on producing our steel indices until Thursday of this week.
It’s Tuesday evening and we are deep into our 8th SMU Steel Summit Conference. The official number of attendees is 912, which exceeded our most optimistic expectations when we did our last forecast about six months back.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) we have a very strong program with Alan Beaulieu of ITR Economics, a one-on-one discussion between Nucor CEO John Ferriola and me, an interesting manufacturing panel, followed by Ron Insana of CNBC and then another one-on-one with Robert Perlman, Executive Chairman of CRU, along with a panel consisting of Chris Houlden and Josh Spoores of CRU and myself.
Then I get to collapse and sleep for four days (thank you for the Labor Day weekend).
We will not publish on Sunday due to the holiday.
I want to thank my SMU team for all of the hard work they have put into our conference as well as our newsletters: Ray Culley, Jill Waldman, Brett Linton, Diana Packard, Alison Lalonde, Tim Triplett, Peter Wright and Sandy Williams. I also want to thank Steve Painter, Chuck McDaniels and Jeff Lalonde for their help during the conference.
We will have much more about the conference in Thursday evening’s issue of Steel Market Update.
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, President & CEO

John Packard
Read more from John PackardLatest in Final Thoughts

Final Thoughts: AMU brings the news
Usually, I write about steel in this column because, well, we’re Steel Market Update. But before I get to steel, I want to give a shoutout to my colleagues at Aluminum Market Update (AMU) – SMU’s new sister publication.

Final Thoughts
If I could change something, it’d be this: Political news would get more boring. And news about steel prices and steel demand would get a little more exciting.

Final Thoughts: Survey says edition
SMU’s latest survey results indicate that steel market participants think sheet prices are at or near a bottom. But most also think there is limited upside once they inflect higher.

Final Thoughts
A recent IIMA meeting in Brazil shows how the US and much of the rest of the world are operating in parallel realities.

Final Thoughts
We moved our pricing momentum indicators from “lower” to “neutral” for all sheet products this week. For those keeping score, we had been at “lower” for six weeks. And I know some of you think we should have been there for even longer.