Daily iron ore price update (unfolding disaster)

Iron ore price charts for May 5, 2017:

Qindgao slumped to new correction lows. Tianjin crashed 6% to below $60. Coking coal spot has crashed -18% since Wednesday to $206. Futures are at $120. Futures for both managed a muted rebound Friday night on US jobs. It won’t last. Thermal is resetting lower. Steel has rolled again. The recent bear market rally added 1.4mt to Chinese port stocks last week to be almost at new highs.

Unbelievably, the iron ore price has now crash -37% and port inventories have fallen just 250kt. For anyone that knows this market properly, this is disastrous. By my calculations, there is roughly -$1 per tonne in that port pile once the destock gets underway.

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About the author

David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.