Commodities

Here are the iron ore charts for March 10, 2015: Spot faded with Tianjin benchmark hit for 3.7% to $57.40.

The Brent oil price fell last night but still looks firm trading at $40.48 as I write.

From BofAML: Home prices have fueled up fast in Tier-1 cities but remained quite stable in lower tier cities.

A subdued today for big iron with BHP down -1.4%, RIO 0.95% and FMG -1%.

From the AFR: Terry Campbell, the chairman of Australian Foundation Investment Company, which has large holdings in BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto as well as the major banks, has a reassuring message for investors – he believes the bottom of the commodity price rout is near.

From Bloomie: Citic Ltd.

From Deutsche: No change to Pilbara strategy Rio reiterated their Pilbara guidance of 330Mt in 2016 and 350Mt in 2017 with their 2015 results.

From Fairfax: The federal government is cautiously eyeing a windfall gain from soaring iron ore prices in recent days, fuelling hopes of billions of extra dollars flooding into Canberra, but the financial improvement is not being matched by a rise in political certainty.

From the AFR late yesterday: Mr Forrest, joined by the heads of many smaller West Australian miners including Mr Goncalves, last year blamed major iron ore miners Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton for signalling overproduction to drive down prices and put smaller players out of business.

Here are the iron ore charts for March 9, 2016: Tianjin benchmark crashed 6% to $59.60 per tonne. Dalian took off again ($53) but at this point is still just catching up to spot.

Brent oil was strong again last night but has been unable to make new highs at $40.70 as I write.

From ACCC head, Rod Sims: It is a pleasure to be here.

BHP is down -3.3%, RIO -3.2% and FMG -2.5% although the latter is clearly still getting some support: Dalian is off three points at this juncture.

From Reuters: Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive officer at DoubleLine Capital, said on Tuesday the recent rally in risk assets is nearing an end.

Here are the iron ore charts for March 8, 2016: Tianjin spot rose another 1.1% to $63.30.

Today’s iron ore coverage ranges from the outright stupid: Oil falling to $US10 a barrel.

From Deutsche: Blending: The conceptual plan is to produce 80-100Mt of blended product. This may involve combining 40-60Mtpa from Vale’s 65% Fe low impurity (2% SiO2 , 1.7% Al2O3 ) Carajas product with 40Mtpa from FMG’s low grade 57% Fe “Super Special” high impurity (5% SiO2 , 2.8% Al2O3 ) product from Cloud Break.

It’s baaack.

The Brent oil price finally ran our of puff last night falling -3.5% to $39.42.

Big iron ore is retracing today after the past few days of wild action as BHP falls -0.7%, RIO -1.8% and FMG -11.2% after all hammered higher at the open: Dalian is still limit up at 423 just trying to catch up to spot.

An excellent piece today from Matthew Stevens adds some more to the Vale/FMG intrigue: This looms then as an alliance for all seasons.

Here it is again: I think it safe to say that news of this got out yesterday and fired up the iron ore rally.