Hot-rolled coil prices in the United States have surged above $65 per hundredweight ($1,300 per short ton), and there is no sign that the rally will end any time soon, according to market participants. Fastmarkets' daily steel hot-rolled coil index, fob mill US was calculated at $65.24 per cwt ($1,304.80 per ton) on Thursday March 18, up by 0.69% from $64.79 per cwt on Wednesday March 17 and by 1....Read More

European ferro-titanium producers have started negotiations for deliveries of the alloy to consumers in the steel sector between April and June, and while no prices have yet been discussed, an acute shortage of titanium scrap will be a key issue for suppliers, producers told Fastmarkets this week.Ferro-titanium producers have been holding back from securing new deals for their intake of scrap and...Read More

Mainstream media and the large mining companies are finally catching on to what we at AOTH have been saying for the past two years: the copper market is heading for a severe supply shortage due to a perfect storm of under-exploration/ lack of discovery of new deposits, clashing with a huge increase in demand due to electrification and decarbonization.Dramatic price riseCopper is trading over $4.00...Read More

South African manganese miner UMK will stop road transportation of manganese ore due to significant pressure from rising logistical costs, a company spokesperson told Fastmarkets on Thursday March 18.While the miner will honor existing contractual obligations, it will not pursue further road transportation options due to rising freight costs making certain export channels economically unfeasi...Read More

Many investors sense that the country, and the world, has drifted into uncharted territory.The last year has been extraordinary. There have been COVID lockdowns, a disputed presidential election, and multi-trillion-dollar federal deficits and bailouts. The Federal Reserve has injected more money into markets than ever before.This insanity showed up in the physical gold and silver markets.Bullion d...Read More

Here are five Fastmarkets stories you might have missed on Thursday March 18 that are worth another look.Brazilian apparent steel consumption increased 24.5% year on year in February, while crude steel output grew 3.8% in the same comparison, according to figures from national steel association, A??o Brasil. ...Read More

Since its peak in the spring of 2020, the U.S. dollar index has lost almost 12 percent, and it could decline even further, thus supporting gold prices.There is a weakness in the U.S. dollar. Let’s start off by taking a look at the chart below. As you can see, the broad trade-weighted dollar index has been declining recently. Since its peak in late March 2020, the greenback has lost almost 12...Read More

It’s all connected. The Eurozone’sunderperformance boosts the USD, thus placing pressure on gold and the ETFs.So, which ETFs will suffer most?A large part of yesterday’sfree version of the analysis focused on the Eurozone’s economicoutlook and how it affects the precious metals. We’ll eventually get to Europeagain later in today’s analysis, but let’s first...Read More

Dear Reader,You come to our website looking for market answers.Well, with the help of our friends at Elliott Wave International, we are happy to offer you a new, free opportunity to see what's likely next for cotton, soybeans and crude oil -- for the entire 2021. EWI is the world's largest independent market-forecasting firm. Every year, their Chief Commodity Analyst Jeffrey Kennedy records an in-...Read More

Forget gold and silver for a moment.Do you hear the music? Yes, it’s coming from the mining ETFs club. But how longwill the party last?And more importantly, why miners, you mayask? Because miners tend to outperform in the early days of a major rally.Afterclosing only $0.10 below myinitial downside target of $31 on Mar. 1 , the GDX ETF could be ripe for an upward revision. Able to ignore much...Read More

Stocks sharply reversed intraday, and closed just wherethey opened the prior Friday. That indicates quite some pressures, quite somesearching for direction in this correction that isn‘t over just yet. Stockshave had a great run over the past 4 months, getting a bit ahead of themselvesin some aspects such as valuations. Then, grappling with the rising long-termrates did strike. So did inflati...Read More

Oat futures' recent surge to 7-year highs wasn't caused by the oat milk craze; think "market psychology" instead Generally speaking, the idea of oats is about as exciting as, well, a bowl of steel cut oatmeal. But this chart of oat futures shows why this ordinarily ordinary grain has stolen the commodity spotlight. For starters, February 2021 saw oat prices soar to their highest level in 7 years....Read More

During the 1970's, the U.S. experienced adecade of below-trend economic growth combined with rising interest rates – andeventually – massively higher gold and silver prices.Some sectors boomed while others lagged,and then as now, the majority of the population struggled with rising home andcommodity prices, bookmarked by lofty interest rates.This stilted and challenging environmen...Read More

As you well know the PM complex has been trading at a very important inflection point for the last month or so looking for the next important move either up or down. I can make a case today for either direction but the Chartology is strongly suggesting the next important move is going to be to the downside. In the very short term, days to maybe a week or so we could see some backtesting to many im...Read More

As financial markets sold off this week, preciousmetals got dragged down in the selling. The culprit, once again, was risingbond yields.On Thursday, the 10-year Treasury climbed above 1.5%. While still low on ahistorical range, the upside momentum has investors concerned. Over the pastseven months, the 10-year yield has tripled from a low of just 52 basis points. The 10-year note serves as a bench...Read More

Chinese market participants expect steel output to stay high in March amid a profit recovery, even after the government ordered mills in Tangshan to cut production for environmental protection, Fastmarkets heard.On March 11, Huang Runqiu, minister of ecology and environment, visited four mills in Tangshan - the steelmaking hub in northern China - and found all of them had been running at high oper...Read More

Several factors influence gold prices (mainly the US dollar, gold ETF inflows/ outflows, inflation rate, bond yields, safe haven demand, physical gold demand, gold supply) but none is more reliable than real interest rates.The demand for gold moves inversely to interest rates — the higher the rate of interest, the lower the demand for gold, the lower the rate of interest the higher the deman...Read More

Gold has suffered unrelentingselling in the last couple months, hammering it and its miners’ stocks muchlower.  Those outsized anomalous losseshave left sentiment in tatters, with overpowering bearishness universal.  Gold’s thrashing had nothing to do withfundamentals, it was driven by cascading momentum selling in gold futures andgold-ETF shares.  But such dumping isfin...Read More

Zinc's futures price showed the biggest fall among the base-metals complex at the close of trading on the London Metal Exchange on Thursday March 18, with consolidation in the complex continuing, while tin's price edged close to the $26,000 per tonne mark.Zinc was trading at $2,792 per tonne at the 5pm close on Thursday after being above the $2,800 per tonne mark for the past week. Its closing pri...Read More

Meanwhile, eyes are fixed on interest rates for US Treasury bonds. During the same six-month period (August 2020 – February 2021) during which the price of gold fell by seventeen percent, the price of the 20-year US Treasury bond fell by twenty percent. That IS a huge deal, as it corresponds to sharply higher interest rates from less than 1% last August to as high as 2.26% just the other day...Read More