Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
April 16, 2014
Our Steel 101 workshop on May 6-7, 2014 is sold out and we have a three person waiting list. We are working on two more workshops to be conducted over the balance of the year and we will advise the dates and locations once we have worked out all of the details. Our goal is to conduct one during the summer months (probably August) and another one in early October.
As mentioned in a prior publication we have settled on the dates for our new Managing Price Risk 2: Strategies & Execution workshop. The dates are June 24 & 25, 2014 and the workshop will be conducted at the CME building in downtown Chicago. We are working on some final details and hope to be able to open registration very soon.
My article on steel sales: How to go from being noticed to getting orders, has created a lot of emails and social media contacts. I appreciate the communication and stories of your own. Please feel free to provide your thoughts and suggestions from your career which might help mentor someone new to the industry. I intend to follow up the article with one or more articles centered on sales with the next one coming in Sunday evening’s Steel Market Update.
Premium members – we should have the survey results on the website by no later than mid-morning on Friday. I am also working on our next service center inventory excess or deficit forecast which I hope to share with you on Friday as well.
If anyone is interested in learning more about the benefits of being a Premium member please do not hesitate to give me a call (800-432-3475) or send me an email: John@SteelMarketUpdate.com.
This offer is not inclusive to just existing members. If you are currently on a free trial and would like to know more about any of our products – three newsletters, Premium, Executive and Monthly – as well as our workshops and conferences – please give me a call or send me an email.
As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, Publisher
John Packard
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It’s once again A Tale of Two Cities in the steel market. Some are almost euphoric about Trump’s victory. Others, some rather bearish, are more focused on the day-to-day market between now and Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.
Final Thoughts
One of the perhaps unintentional perks of being a trade journalist is the opportunity to travel and cover an array of industry conferences and events. Some I've attended have been at fun locations, like Palm Springs and Tampa, Fla. Others have been in more practical locations, like SMU’s Steel Summit in Atlanta and American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and Steel Manufacturers Association (SMA) meetings in Washington, D.C.
Final Thoughts
t this point in the game I think what we can say about Nippon Steel’s proposed buy of Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel is that it will go through, it won’t go through, or the outcome will be something new and completely unexpected. Then again, I’m probably still missing a few options.
Final Thoughts
President-elect Donald Trump continues to send shockwaves through the political establishment (again). And steel markets and ferrous scrap markets continue to be, well, anything but shocking. As the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." (I thought the quote might have been Yankees catcher Yogi Berra in 1949. Google taught me something new today.)
Final Thoughts
President-elect Donald Trump will officially retake the White House on Jan. 20. I’ve been getting questions about how his administration’s policies might reshape the steel industry and domestic manufacturing. I covered the tumult and norm busting of Trump's first term: Section 232, Section 301, USMCA - and that's just on the trade policy side of things. It's safe to say that we'll have no shortage of news in 2025 when it comes to trade and tariffs.