Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
October 4, 2019
I will be out of the office this entire week traveling first to Cincinnati as we conduct our sold-out Steel 101 workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday. Later in the week I will be traveling to Minnesota (where I see temperatures are supposed to be in the 30’s for highs) for a Board of Trustees meeting for Hamline University.
On Monday, SMU will send out invitations to participate in our early October flat rolled and plate steel market trends survey. Invitations will go out at 8 a.m. ET. If you receive an invitation, please take a few minutes to answer the first question at the end of the email, which will then take you to the entire questionnaire. If you used to get an invitation, and for some reason they have stopped – check your SPAM folder.
If you would like to be added to the invitation list, please send your request to info@SteelMarketUpdate.com.
We will send out our Service Center Inventories and Shipments “Flash Report” on Monday. There are some surprises contained in the report, which is provided only to data providers. The full report, which is provided to both data providers and our Premium level members, will be available on Oct. 14. If you are a service center who inventories prime flat rolled or plate steel products in the United States, and you would like to participate in our monthly analysis by providing your company’s data on a confidential basis, please contact me at John@SteelMarketUpdate.com or Estelle.Tran@crugroup.com. If you are an Executive level member and you would like to receive our breakdown of Service Center Shipments and Inventories data, please contact Paige Mayhair at Paige@SteelMarketUpdate.com
Registration is open for our January 2020 Steel 101: Introduction to Steel Making & Market Fundamentals Workshop, which will be held in Ontario, Calif. (Los Angeles area) on Jan. 7-8. Included will be a tour of the California Steel Industries (CSI) steel mill. Details can be found on our website: www.SteelMarketUpdate.com/Events/Steel101
As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.
John Packard, President & CEO
John Packard
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Final Thoughts
We had an October surprise here at SMU on Wednesday. I was working from the CRU office in Pittsburgh, and the internet connection briefly went out. As luck would have it, that happened smack in the middle of a live Community Chat webinar. Fortunately, my colleague David Schollaert stepped in, Zekelman Industries CEO Barry Zekelman rolled with the punches – and the show went on. Could there be any more October surprises in store for us and for the steel market?
Final Thoughts
We just wrapped up another Steel 101 workshop, easily the most hands-on industry workshop on steelmaking and market fundamentals, in this humble opinion. Last week on Tuesday and Wednesday, SMU’s Steel 101 was held in Starkville, Miss.
Final Thoughts
Everybody has an opinion about politics these days. More importantly for our readers, though, every business has a bottom line. A popular question in our most recent steel buyers survey asked how uncertainty around the upcoming US presidential election could affect that line.
Final Thoughts
I’m trying to make sure this is not a TL;DR Final Thoughts. As a journalism school professor once told me, ‘No one but your mom reads more than 1,000 words.’ Also, as the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand as well. With that in mind, below are a couple of charts that I think go a long way toward explaining how prices and lead times have been relatively stable despite concerns about demand.
Final Thoughts
It’s another week of big headlines for the world writ large – an expanding war in the Middle East, another potentially catastrophic hurricane – and not much going on in the world of steel prices. “Call me Stevie Wonder, I see nothing.” That’s how one service center executive described the current sheet market. There seems to be almost a competition among some of our Community Chat guests and contributors to outdo each other in flowery ways to say, “