Iron ore price

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.

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.

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.

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.

Macquarie Bank called this rally and is still bullish: We had expected spot iron-ore prices to keep rallying: Last week Macquarie’s Commodities team highlighted the increasing bullish sentiment for iron-ore, with some traders at the Metal Bulletin Beijing conference expecting iron-ore prices to test US$60/t.

From FMG comes another large “wow”: Strange bedfellows given they’re fighting it out for marginal cost producer status in the long run.

Here are the iron ore price charts for March 7, 2016: Largest one day in history for spot with Tianjin benchmark up 19% to $62.60: Paper can’t keep up.

Wow: 26% up today.

Big iron is reaching for the stars with BHP flying 5.5%, RIO 3.3% and FMG 13%.

I noted last week the charts on iron ore miners were very bullish and holy cow, Batman, Fortescue has gone nuts today: My charting software has blown a gasket so far this morning so I can’t give you more but suffice to say that FMG has just broken out big.

The Mining GFC has been postponed by a perfect US jobs report that was perfect for growth and equally perfect for inflation as wage growth fell away.

Here are the iron ore charts for March 4, 2016: Spot firmed with Tianjin benchmark up 1.4 per cent to $52.40.

Port Hedland has released its February  shipping statistics and they are interesting.

There is no disputing it, price and chart action is bullish big iron no matter what the fundamentals say.

If you think that the iron ore crash is over then think again.

From Moody’s: Moody’s Investors Service has today downgraded the issuer ratings of BHP Billiton Limited and BHP Billiton Plc to A3 from A1.

Here are the iron ore price charts for March 3, 2015:    Spot firmed with Tianjin benchmark up 0.2% to $51.70. Paper fell (though Dalian recovered overnight).