As you can see above from today’s iron ore complex price table, it was another lacklustre day’s trade on Friday. The ore chart now looks this way:
Which we might describe as a loss of momentum. The steel chart is similar if marginally better:
There’s clearly been an ore restocking impulse running through Chinese markets for the past month but it’s yet to show up in Chinese port inventories:
This reminds me of the Alphaville argument last week that steel mills have made a structural shift to lower inventories. While this won’t effect the level of ore prices, it may mean greater volatility.
Likewise, there is no apparent bounce in Chin’s coastal bulk shipping indexes, which are both still losing:
No sign of Chinese “recovery” there. And that kind of makes last week’s decent rebound in thermal coal seem like a dead cat bounce:
We shall see.
