Nickel prices on the London Metal Exchange had fallen by 1.4% by the close of trading on Monday June 18, pressured by a strong dollar index and low trading volumes across the complex. Closing below $15,000 per tonne for the first time since May 29, nickel's three-month price has edged away from its steady approach towards $16,000 per tonne last week. Pressured by a surging dollar index, which reac...Read More

Silver fell off a cliff last Friday.Lows for this cycle may not be in yet.Wait for a swing.Many investors thought the bottom was in for silver (SLV) but the sizable drop last Friday (June 15) has put everything back in context. Silver (being a leveraged play on gold (GLD)) is attracting investors in the precious metals space. Why? Well, it is one of the commodities that got absolutely hammered in...Read More

   •  Escalating US-China trade tensions prompt some safe-haven buying.   •  Persistent USD buying keeps a lid on any meaningful up-move. Gold struggled to register any meaningful recovery and remained within striking distance of near six-month lows set on Friday. The ongoing US Dollar rally, supported by last week's hawkish Fed rate hike move was seen a...Read More

Comex copper prices on Monday June 18 are on a three-day downturn to a two-week low amid escalating trade conflicts between the United States and China. Copper for July settlement on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 3.65 cents or 1.2% to $3.1080 per lb. Earlier, the contract traded at $3.1065, the lowest since June 4. A rekindling of trade disputes between the US and Chi...Read More

Trading activity in the seaborne coking coal market was muted on Monday June 18, with the top spot buyer China on holiday. On Monday, the Queensland Resources Council (QRC) said the industry was urging the state's rail freight operator Aurizon to, "return to normal maintenance practices and as a monopoly infrastructure provider, make its case to the regulatory and the industry [body]." Earlie...Read More

Although base metals are under pressure in the short term, we have a bullish bias to our 2018 price forecasts given the supportive background of solid global economic growth and the fact that all six base metal markets look set to be in fundamental deficit this year. But each has a slightly different supply-side story and this aspect should be the main differentiator. For example, zinc's narrative...Read More

Friday's gold drop was painful for gold bulls.If not for Friday's action, gold would have been up for the week.Commercials continued to increase POSITIVE bets on gold.Gold was the only precious metal covered in the COT report that showed Commercial bullishness.Single day drops don't make or break a good investment, and we think gold is still attractive here.The latest Commitment of Tra...Read More

Despite Chinese winter smelter production cuts generally falling short of expectations and domestic stocks continuing to climb - both of which suggest the market remains far more comfortably supplied at this point than aluminium bulls had been anticipating - prices still rallied into the year-end to reach $2,290/tonne for the first time since March 2012.And after a New Year pull-back the strength...Read More

Gold (XAU/USD) fell to $1,275 - the lowest level since Dec. 26 on Friday, confirming a bearish revival. The XAU calls shed value after sharp sell-off in gold prices. Gold fell to fresh 2018 low of $1,275 on Friday, having failed to scale the key resistance at $1,302.76 in a convincing manner for three straight weeks. The sell-off put focus back on the double top reversal seen in mid-May and has...Read More

Copper prices were working lower during most of December and in the absence of any bullish triggers we had been expecting that trend to continue. But in late December, fund buying picked up aggressively, driving prices to a fresh multi-year high of $7,203/tonne. There was little fundamental justification for this and we should consider it a warning that speculators and investors feeling optimistic...Read More

Lead prices remain on their steady uptrend since the summer lows last year and in January have been eroding resistance around October's 6-year high above $2,600/tonne. We expect the underlying strengthening fundamentals, especially on the supply side, to maintain the uptrend this year. Primary producers may well struggle to respond to higher lead prices and we doubt there is much hoarded scrap aro...Read More

Keith Weiner provides a "forensic look at the intra-day action on Friday", and this is what he found...by Keith Weiner of Monetary MetalsWe have been writing about capital destruction. This week let's look at an event which is currently making news. Social Security will begin tapping into its trust fund this year. This happens, as the Social Security Board of Trustees states antiseptically, "four...Read More

The Indian government's plans of hitting 300 million tonnes of steel capacity by 2030 sounds overambitious in the current scenario given that output only managed to reach the 101 million tonne mark in 2017 - indicating three-fold (Read More

"I am hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin...Space Force as the Sixth Branch of the Armed Forces."Half Dollar's Note: If we are indeed going to have a Space Force, the United States is going to be buying on heck of an amount of physical silver. Here's just one example of how silver is popular in the Aero-space industry thanks to its ability to reduce the e...Read More

After suffering for some seven years through to 2015, the world's steelmakers have had cause for cheer over the past couple of years. After some heavy losses and write-downs, they finally appear to have emerged from the wreckage of the global financial crisis. An economic upswing has taken root in most regions of the world, Chinese steel output and export growth has slowed noticeably, and steel pr...Read More

For a number of years problems at Ilva, the largest steelworks in Europe, have been casting shadow over the performance of the whole Italian steel industry. Will an acquisition of Ilva by a consortium led by ArcelorMittal, now in its final stage, be a game changer for the market?Following multiple reports of environmental and health problems caused by the Taranto plant, in 2013 Ilva was placed und...Read More

China announced that it had terminated steel production in all the country's illegal induction furnaces by the end of June last year. The majority of the operators in China are primarily small size private mills that use low quality scrap to produce substandard rebar. These rebars are mixed with grade III (HRB400) rebar and sold at a discount to construction contractors. For a long period, the gov...Read More

The closure of some induction furnaces in China in 2016 followed by the government's crackdown on all unlicensed IFs in mid-2017 freed up some scrap volumes, albeit arguably of low-quality material. Chinese domestic scrap prices came under pressure from the increased supply, which prevented them from keeping pace with the rise in steel and other raw material markets in the fourth quarter of 2016;...Read More

About a year ago, metallurgical coal embarked on a long journey of great volatility and disruption. It emerged as the best performing commodity in 2016 after several years of declining prices. Prices have dropped and spiked several times since then and the volatility continued in 2017 with a cyclone disrupting the market and eventually also affecting the way the commodity is priced. Although therm...Read More

The past year, soaring metallurgical coal prices have greatly affected the costs involved in producing pig iron, a form of crude iron which is the product of the blast furnace. Metal Bulletin Research's Global Steel Cost Service details how coking coal and coke costs usually averaged around 35% of total pig iron production expenditure in 2014 and 2015 while iron ore stood for the majority of costs...Read More