Final Thoughts

August 26, 2019

We are not producing our flat rolled and plate steel price ranges and averages this evening as we are tied up with our conference. We will produce new pricing on Tuesday of next week, after the Labor Day Weekend Holiday.

On the elevator up to my room this evening (Tuesday, Aug. 27) was a gentleman who told me, “Man, when you buy a lot of steel it’s like speed dating.” He was referring to the number of suppliers who attend the SMU Steel Summit Conference. He admitted at least he was able to see all of his suppliers in one place without expending extra energy or cost.

The 2019 SMU Steel Summit Conference is officially the best attended conference we have ever hosted. We smashed last year’s tally of 912 attendees as we brought in 1,078 executives to this year’s event. We have had great programs, speakers and incredible networking opportunities for everyone who is here.

For those of you who are worried about who is going to win the next presidential election, our early polling has it a Donald Trump runaway. We conducted a real-time poll of our attendees and got 404 responses. Of those, 53 percent were for Donald Trump, 23 percent for the Democratic candidate, 3 percent for a third-party candidate and 21 percent undecided. In 2016, our polling accurately predicted a Trump victory with twice as many attendees supporting Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. I know we have a year to go and the Democrat has not yet been selected…

On Monday, SMU and the CME Group hosted the largest Managing Price Risk Workshop (steel) in the United States with almost 300 people in attendance. We are looking at conducting new Managing Price Risk Workshops of our own based on the turnout, and the amount of interest our Monday workshop created. If you or your company are interested in learning more about how to use HRC contracts as a way of hedging price risk, please let me know: info@SteelMarketUpdate.com

There is one day left in our conference. It will be a strong day for our attendees as we have a speaker discussing mill costing, economist Alan Beaulieu of ITR Economics, a panel on whether the new steel mill capacity is needed, Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President Bush, and a panel on banking and finance and how the markets will react should there be an economic slowdown. The conference will end at 2:30 ET.

I look forward to seeing you in Atlanta for one more day.

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

John Packard, President & CEO