Final Thoughts

This evening’s issue is a bit different than most Sunday evenings. With the Thanksgiving Holiday and most steel-related businesses being closed on Friday the amount of direct news was limited. We do have a couple of articles about new home sales. oil rigs and durable goods but, I spent a good portion of my 5 hour flight from LAX to Fort Lauderdale reviewing the results of our flat rolled steel market trends survey which we just completed on Wednesday. I want to share some of the data with our Executive level members that our Premium level members get twice every month as part of their membership. With the year coming to a close I hope by sharing some of the Premium benefits with all of our Executive level customers that you may want to budget for an upgrade to Premium level membership for 2017.

As I mentioned earlier in one of the Premium level articles shared today, we conduct our flat rolled market trends analysis twice per month, at the beginning and then again during the middle of the month. We invite almost 600 people representing approximately 550 different companies. We place a heavy emphasis on those in the manufacturing and service center/wholesaler segments of the industry. Combined these two groups make up close to 90 percent of the total respondents. In any one survey we receive 100 to as many as 150 responses.

We have a number of data sets that are produced from the surveys. Included are out SMU Steel Buyers Sentiment Index (both Current and Future), Mill Lead Times and Mill Negotiations. We share each of these proprietary products with all of our members: Executive, Premium and Free Trial.

We cover many subjects during the survey process and much of what is covered is made available to our Premium level members. This includes items regarding foreign steel (article in tonight’s issue), manufacturing and distributor buying patterns, demand (we will publish and article in Tuesday evening’s issue later this week), mill lead times from a manufacturing and distribution perspective (article in tonight’s issue), SC Spot Prices which is sometimes made available to our Executive level members (article in tonight’s issue), service center months of inventories on hand (SMU data not MSCI) and many other items.

SMU also covers topical subjects during the survey. This past week we covered steel price announcements and lead times (article in tonight’s issue) as well. All of this information was made available to our Premium level members on Wednesday afternoon of last week.

If you have questions about becoming a Premium level member please contact our office: 800-432-3475 or info@SteelMarketUpdate.com and we will do our best to answer them for you. You can also find information online under the “subscribe” tab in our website: www.SteelMarketUpdate.com

I expect this will be a busy week as those buyers who waited to buy will most likely be pulling the trigger this week. We will roll into the month of December by the end of the week which means negotiations will begin in earnest for ferrous scrap for December. The early expectations are for December to be another “up” (steel mills paying higher prices) month.

As always your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, Publisher