Find below the iron ore table for April 30, 2013:
And the charts. For spot:
12 month swaps:
Rebar average:
And rebar futures:
Slow trade can probably be put down to May Day holidays.
Today’s interesting news is that CISA has issued a plea to Chinese steel makers to…err…stop making steel:
Thankfully for Australia the CISA plea comes too late. Here’s a chart of steel inventories at the end of March:
Clearly steel makers were anticipating a new round of explosive infrastructure growth with the beginning of a new regime and they set stock amounts very high early in the year. This goes a long way to explaining the iron ore blow off in the first quarter.
With stocks at nose-bleed levels and CISA warning that the surge is not coming (so far, rightly) we’ve got a set up for another boom and bust cycle for steel and iron ore in the second half.
I guess business optimism is the same the world over.
