Daily iron ore price update (brief reprieve)

David Llewellyn-Smith

Wednesday 1 November 2017

Iron ore price charts for October 31, 2017:

Tianjin benchmark lifted 40 cents to $58.40. Paper was up a little overnight. Coking coal was hammered. Steel is fading. Last week’s port stocks rose a demoralising 3.6mt to 135.5mt. Yesterday’s steel PMI fell to 52.7 and 55.9 for new orders.

Markets took the data as glass half full. It is, to the extent the steel PMI indicates an orderly slowdown. But, it is still a slowdown and it runs until mid-March next year. It hasn’t even started in earnest. If steel output at these levels delivers that kind of port stocks jump then iron ore is going to keep falling.

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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.