Prices for steel reinforcing bar in the United States ticked up following increase announcements from several domestic mills, and sources expect that uptrend will continue next year if ferrous scrap values move up as anticipated in the January 2020 trade.Fastmarkets assessed the price for steel reinforcing bar (rebar), fob mill US at $29.50-30.50 per hundredweight ($590-610 per short ton) on...Read More
Technical analysis update forthe SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD).Long-term bullish continuationanticipated once current correction is completed.Looks like a deeper retracementmay come in the near-term, before resumption of the rally. Long-term breakoutFollowing the August 2018 swing low of $111.06, GLDrallied 32.2% to the September 2019 high of $146.82. That rally foundresistance in the area of Fibonac...Read More
Most copper scrap discounts in the United States increased as the Comex copper price continued to strengthen week on week. Fastmarkets assessed the copper scrap No1 copper (also known as brass mills' bare bright), discount, buying price, delivered to brass mill US, at 12-14 cents per lb on Wednesday December 18, increasing from 11-13 cents per lb the week before.Also registering 1-cent gains were...Read More
Mike Gleason: It is my privilege now to welcomeback our good friend Greg Weldon, CEO and president of Weldon Financial. Greg hasdecades of market research and trading experience specializing in the metalsand commodity markets and even authored a book back in 2016 titled GoldTrading Boot Camp where he accurately predicted the implosion of theUS credit market and urged people to...Read More
Technical Analysis is the theory that price relates all news, fundamental and correlative future expectations into current and recent price activity. It is the theory that price is the ultimate indicator and that charts paint a very clear picture for those individuals that are capable of understanding the message that is being presented. In this research article, we are going to highli...Read More
We all know that the gold and silver Commitments of Traders are very extended and at levels of commercial net shorts and large spec net longs that tend to be in place at tops in the metals. Well, the metals topped in the summer, so what does that tell us?For one thing it tells us that bull market rules are different from bear market rules as per this post from August as gold was topping.Gold and S...Read More
Steel demand in North Africa is projected to grow by around 3% in the coming year to 23.5 million tonnes, delegates were told at Fastmarkets' Middle East Iron & Steel Conference in Dubai on December 9-11.Ramy Saleh, the chief business development officer at Egypt's El Marakby Steel cited gross domestic product and population growth as the main drivers of steel demand in the region, which, accordin...Read More
A few weeks ago we noted the bullish setup for 2020. Macro developments, one way or another will tend to favor Gold. There isn’t a realistic scenario that isn’t Gold bullish. Note the comments from various Fed-heads last week. They are laying the groundwork to target higher than 2% inflation and won’t consider raising rates anytime soon. And if they have to resume cutting rates G...Read More
Here are five Fastmarkets MB stories you might have missed on Thursday December 19 that are worth another look.What's in store for the steel and scrap markets in 2020?Most copper scrap discounts in the United States increased as the Comex copper price continued to strengthen week on week.Spot market prices for alloy-grade and standard-grade cobalt diverged in the first half of the week.Two weeks o...Read More
You may think (or hope) that in your daily life you don’t need to worry about unknowingly eating or otherwise ingesting crude oil or any of its many, many petrochemical byproducts. But you would be wrong. And not just a little wrong--very, very wrong. Petroleum-based substances are in all kinds of innocuous-seeming things that we willingly put into our bodies. Even though petrochemicals are...Read More
Gold prices pushed sharply higher on Tuesday but have stalled ever since. Has the recovery rally completed? I think it has.Leave it to Trump to go and say something that causes the equity markets to print a two-day drop that wipes out more than a week of gains. But the tone in the markets might be changing.The US president went from saying that the trade deal might get delayed until after the elec...Read More
I can remember there were times during the PM complex bull market before 2011 that sometimes the PM metals would rally but the PM stocks were very weak. Then there were times when the PM stock would rise while the PM metals moved very little. At the time of those occurrences it was bewildering as common sense suggested they should all move together and the stronger the metals moved so should the P...Read More
Through the first half of 2019, silver significantlyunderperformed gold. Put another way, gold gained relative to silver –culminating in the gold:silver ratio registering a 27-year high of 95:1. That market signal was received by the mining industry. Sincethere are few primary silver producers, and those that do mine silver alsotypically mine gold and some base metals, precious metals miners...Read More
The European steel industry has welcomed the European Commission's recently launched European Green Deal although further policy and support are required to ensure competitiveness.The European Union plans to be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050 through key policies to cut emissions and invest in research and innovation for green technologies. The decarbonization and modernization of ener...Read More
Base metals prices other than lead closed higher on the London Metal Exchange on Thursday December 19, bolstered by an injection of liquidity into China's open markets, while a weaker US dollar index also proved supportive.Three-month prices trading mixed this morning but ultimately gathered upward momentum after the People's Bank of China (PBoC) injected 30 billion yuan ($4.3 billion) into financ...Read More
Seaborne iron ore prices experienced a slight uptick on Thursday December 19 amid ferrous futures gains in China.Fastmarkets iron ore indices62% Fe fines, cfr Qingdao: $93.77 per tonne, up $0.57 per tonne.62% Fe Pilbara Blend fines, cfr Qingdao: $92.86 per tonne, up $0.57 per tonne.62% Fe low-alumina fines, cfr Qingdao: $93.66 per tonne, up $0.54 per tonne.58% Fe fines high-premium, cfr Qingdao: $...Read More
Nickel broke above $14,000 per tonne again in the morning trading session on the London Metal Exchange on Thursday December 19 despite further stock inflows.The three-month nickel price has traded at an intraday peak of $14,115 per tonne, up around 1.6% on the previous day's close despite stocks in LME-listed warehouses rising by a net 3,324 tonnes to 136,770 tonnes - they have more than doubled t...Read More
Base metals prices other than lead closed higher on the London Metal Exchange on Thursday December 19, bolstered by an injection of liquidity into China's open markets, while a weaker US dollar index also proved supportive.Three-month prices trading mixed this morning but ultimately gathered upward momentum after the People's Bank of China (PBoC) injected 30 billion yuan ($4.3 billion) into financ...Read More
All Fastmarkets prices and premiums due to be published at 4pm London time on Thursday December 19 were delayed due to a technical error. The prices were published six minutes late; the Fastmarkets pricing database, MInD, for all prices has now been updated. The prices affected by the delay include: Aluminium P1020A premium, in-whs dup Rotterdam, $/tonne Alumina index, fob Australia, $/tonne ...Read More
Here are five Fastmarkets MB stories you might have missed on Thursday December 19 that are worth another look.What's in store for the steel and scrap markets in 2020?Most copper scrap discounts in the United States increased as the Comex copper price continued to strengthen week on week.Spot market prices for alloy-grade and standard-grade cobalt diverged in the first half of the week.Two weeks o...Read More