foreign welcome to a scrap life a podcast solely focus on the hustlers grinders operators and business owners who live and breathe the scrap metal industry every day we are the original recyclers no suits required just guts and hard work here is your host brett eckhart the power of social media is crazy especially linkedin i saw a post that eddie orniston posted about the different grades of scrap brass and copper pricing i took that post i forwarded it on to our guy here at united metals nick snyder and next thing you know eddie was flying into boise idaho to talk scrap teach us more about the different grades of brass and sit down for a podcast eddie’s truly lived a scrap life and i had a great time shooting with this guy take a listen well i’m sitting here eddie orensten from alliance steel and man i’m just super stoked this is a just a straight pleasure for me and this is the power of linkedin the re that’s the reality of it don’t ever get it twisted you know with with way we do things we’re very we’re very um outwardly um vocal

about how we run our business who we sell material to and how we go about things but one of the advantages of that is that we get to meet people that you we may not have ever met by just posting stuff online and looking what other people are doing in the scrap industry and i met you via i saw something you posted on linkedin i sent it to nick snyder on our sales team and i said this is some good information check it out he reached out to you you guys started the dialogue next thing you know i mean you’re an and man i can’t thank you enough for uh making the trip out here so it’s a pleasure thank you very much one of the things i can say and then scrambling is the number of people i’ve met truthfully really from around the world yeah and the and have the same conversation and we’re all talking about the same thing so last night we had dinner and we were talking about we were telling stories and just kind of like really just kind of getting to know each other and i felt

pretty good i felt that i had some longevity in in the industry going back three generations and then i talked to you and and that’s what i no matter how much stuff you think you know or how many people you know or how much longevity you have there’s always somebody that has more it’s done more and when i talk to you i’m super humble because of how much you know about scrap and how long you’ve been in the business and just the true history of it so i’m third generation you just told me you’re fourth and you have some son fifth generation so if there’s anybody out there living the scrap life or that has lived like a truly full scrap life i mean i don’t think it gets any more deep than no it’s all you know yeah and around family and everything else describe business is really based around family yeah i mean i consider pretty much a lot of the people i talk to and everything else their family i may not be close but they’re like my social network and they’re like my friends because if i’ve been so devoted

to scrap it’s like you know just love meeting the people yeah and you just that it becomes your network it becomes my network which just to digress like my wife i’ve moved from a few been to a few different cities along the way yeah and she’s just kind of come along and it’s like well wait i don’t have any friends well i still got my friends yeah and that’s my social network uh-huh so give me a little when you give me a little history lesson um similar to yester last night when we were talking about just kind of where how deeply rooted your family is in this industry kind of where you’re talking about your mom your dad might give our audience a little bit of just kind of history lesson on you know where the orange stands when the orange thing actually uh extended from uh the davis family which was originally a west end iron metal founded in about 1912. okay and uh prior to that the other generation which i didn’t know right about was the zulk family which had uh duluth iron metal or azcon corporation which was also

in duluth and the history of west end is my grandfather traded wild rice furs hides so i got involved in deer hides beef skins mink fox uh actually one time the bank had to uh have my uncle go out of the fur business because my other uncle gambled in wolf one year and it wasn’t so good so we were back down to the deer hides in the beef heights why has why has traditionally hides been so connected to scrap you know not only in heights but also the rag rags business and uh there’s another on saks wool if you go out at least in the upper midwest you have seed wool hides and it was just something else that you had to take that came along with the other stuff so you could take care of everybody together and the same time you know you started up a usable steel yard or stuff so people could bring in their scrap and you could supply them usable steel at a lesser price and you can keep their money okay pretty good with that yeah and uh i both worked my father had a smaller operation

up in northern wisconsin which my brother still has and still conducting business and that business had been around since i believe the 1930s your older brother young my brother middle brother okay my younger brother younger brother okay uh the way it was i had even a younger brother but he was too heavy for the light work and too light for the heavy work okay forever vice versa so he would just kind of sit in the office but growing up at my dad’s place it was like you finished school eight nine years old well where do you hang out i hang out with mommy and daddy in the yard yeah and i sit in the back and starts cleaning brass didn’t like using the alligator shear or anything and just watching people come in and just you know whether i’d sweep a floor or anything else one interesting story is uh my dad had to work for somebody else for a while and i’d work weekends there and i learned the story of how to push a push broom the owner of the company louis phillips uh he got mad at me i was my

part of my job was cleaning up the garage and the trucks and he found me pulling on the push broom he’s been this is a guy millionaire spends like almost an hour with me showing me how i’m supposed to push the bra and a millionaire back then was i have no idea yeah that’s a word that’s a that’s a lot of money that’s a lot of money today’s money yeah but the but the concept of it is somebody that had done well for themselves still understood the details enough that the details are what probably made him a millionaire oh and you know and he was the crane operator yeah so one of the biggest fears is backing into him because he’d basically run with a loudspeaker or the horn on his crane okay and you just worry about this guy but he could pick up a dime with his crane oh yeah and if later i be became a buyer and he was one of my good suppliers and uh very interesting there were very few people he came off the crane for to meet and one of my first visits he said oh

he’s getting off the crane and coming in to see me so which was kind of an honor because yeah and then later even he’d say hey bring him out to the crane so i’d have to negotiate buying scrap that’s while he’s in his crane yeah i mean if you go back to the old school guys uh-huh and so you you told me last night that your your dad had a yard yep and your mom’s mom’s family had a yard so it was kind of a split yeah it was kind of like uh well maybe they didn’t want to quite bring him into the business then they found him another yard yeah somewhere else exactly which i have talked to if you know we’ve had a few of these podcasts and we were talking about how does how does family how did families grow the scrap business you know years and years ago well you just went and got another family member and you brought them in and then you said okay now you’re going to go run this yard or you’re going to run the ferris or you’re going to run the non-ferrous

so you’re going to run the scale you just brought in as many family members as you could and then because those are the people you could trust because it’s a cash business and you know you got commodities and money’s coming in money’s going out so you wanted to bring as many family members in and maybe the job scenarios weren’t you know as plentiful as they are today so it was a real when you said it was very difficult uh back then if if you had a if your father or your uncle or somebody had a scrap yard you couldn’t get a job at another scrap yard they were always worried about your coming taking whatever you learn and bring it back to your own family yeah that makes what oh you don’t want to learn and i think and that the guys were very protective back then flash forward all the way to 2020 where people like myself are posting on the internet where we sold the material to you know i don’t get into pricing because that’s not that’s a different deal but you know that people would just i’ve had the conversation

with multiple people that have been doing this for 30 40 years and they’re like when you started posting on their who you were selling to that just kind of threw everybody for luke but i think people were trying to come around that the i think the the transparency the veil is getting lifted on the industry we do a lot of good things as an industry the original recyclers the original recyclers when people say that you know the original environmentalists however you want to you know state it but i like to kind of state it as a primary process processor of secondary raw materials oh i like that and now i’m going to get a business card that’s just good it’s going to the title’s big that long so your mom and dad have two separate yards yep you worked at both of them i worked at both of them okay and my mother wanted somebody in from her side of the family in the family business which was a larger operation which gave me the experience to get some foundry experience be able to handle ferrous non-ferrous stainless aluminum so pretty much runs

from a to z okay and we were doing uh back in the 1930s the family was actually shipping uh scrap iron to japan wow it’s like one of the original exporters yep and continued with a non-ferrous with phillip brothers which doesn’t exist anymore with making brass packages and we had a 100 year old foundry in the town and our family had been supplying the foundry for 100 years you were explaining this to me last night and this was i mean new to me about why your area was so crucial um you said it last night but basically there’s this the one of the foundries was in town and basically ever and all the up cars are one of the or the bmw or the ba all had to end wellington railroad all the scraps in the united states wound up in brainerd minnesota and the reason behind that was because that’s where that’s where it was that’s whether switch yard or that’s where they figured they’d have one accumulation from wherever they from wherever it is okay the steel the brasses so and also growing up in the northern minnesota with the mining

industry the taconite the iron ore stuff you got a taste of different types of scrap just like scrap varies from every part of the country yeah and just through my brief conversation with you yesterday and today i mean i i don’t think there’s many people out that understand the percentages and the makeups and the of material no that’s you know that’s uh that’s what i had to do i just kept studying the chemistry and knowing i wanted to know if i’m going to supply somebody some material i’m not going to ruin what they’re melting yeah or it also gave me the opportunity to say hey if i can give this to you for less money instead of you having to buy puring it or other stuff and use scrap instead there was a savings for them and it was an upgrade for myself yeah so after you you worked at your your father’s scrap yard and then your mother’s scrap yard then you decided it was time to go work to some larger i just i just you know i just wanted to know more yeah you know instead of you know calling no

disrespect but on the smaller yards and stuff i just wanted to see what else was out there and i had the opportunity to go to omnisource corporation okay and they gave me a huge opportunity to cover pretty much canada and things west of the mississippi and uh that was fine and then i’ve been able to work with people over in china so when you went to work for omnisource that wasn’t the same omni source that people know today it was i mean it was it was before steel dynamics it was still a large company it was a large company but it wasn’t nearly as large as it is today no i think it’s definitely much larger today and but it was very personal back then too i think some of the corporations are a little too corporate for sure well once once you become publicly traded and some of those other things i think that kind of puts the it takes the the personality that was actually the exact word i was it’s not it is and this business one of my favorite people not favorite people but the type of was i was

always dealing with the old the older people yeah you know the guys in their 60s 70s and 80s and a lot of them could relate to me because they either knew my grandfather or my uncle so when i’d be going in i already had an introduction because when we talk about u.s steel had a steel mill up until i think 1972 1973 up in duluth and we were one of the major suppliers and we’d actually buy boatloads of scrap to come up from chicago oh well up into duluth the mill so when you’re at omni at that point you’re you were you were buying ferris non-ferrous i mostly mostly concentrated on the on the non-ferrous okay i had a great ferris department but i was dealing in that and uh the only other thing i introduced him when i first started is anything i could do to make money was fine yeah so i actually even brokered a few loads of deer heights okay when i got more business with other people oh i don’t have to do the hide business anymore i got enough customers to work on but the

reality of it is is you had the mentality of wherever you worked you wanted to bring value right and if it’s bringing if it’s brokering deer hides to make a little bit extra money to help get you while you built the book of business on the non-ferrous side that’s what you did and that was the scariest thing uh leaving the family business and going to somewhere like omnisource is whoa which customers are going to still come with me can i develop some of these customers or not and one of my little stories with louie phillips who i was working with who gets off the crane with me i had kind of a budget an omni and i was kind of getting stretched where i was kind of getting to the limit where hey maybe i i’ll be out of business in december from the virgin all of a sudden i walk into his office we sit down sells me about three million pounds of scrap fair non-ferrous non-ferrous nice about uh a million half pounds of just some copper and i and then figured what i’m making from this oh i

could still be in keep my office up here in minneapolis where i was at the time for another six months based on what i was making yeah and uh the only real problem with that particular thing is the first load goes down in dolan brass and what discovers oh there’s copper coated steel in the bricks so after making this huge deal i took a plane ticket went down with the magnet pointed out all the problems went back to louie and said hey this is the situation well there was another rejection so finally we have to kind of eradicate part of the deal yeah and in this particular case if anyone remembers we were operating in a backwardation if you know what a backwardation is correct that’s where the spot market is trading higher than the futures market and at some point there was as much as three four five ten cents in the back redation so if you didn’t deliver the scrap the month it was done they’d penalize you and you go to the next and that the reason for the backwardization is strong is because people think that the current market is

is better than what they anticipate the future market to be because they feel like maybe we’ve peaked out and the demand is so strong in the beginning that they just got to take the stuff and they’re paying the premiums because they have they have sales and that was a difficult time to operate and what year is that oh i want to say it was pretty much from the the late 80s late 80s okay i want to say somewhere between 86 and 90. i may be incorrect in there but you’d have to go back to a customer and say well you know well because of this you now owe me the back on top of it yeah but the point is if you’re in a backwardation generally the person if the material was rejected or something you’d still be able to re claim that amount gotcha in other words he’s going to be able to sell it for more money than what he originally sold it to you so your relationship with this guy um say his name again i’m sorry uh louis phillips yeah your your relationship with louie enabled you to go to

him from i mean i talked to people that said he’s never come in to see me or some people that have sat in his office for six hours and the guy still wouldn’t get off the grain meantime he’s beating me up for a quarter of a cent a pound for material and he puts me on hold and he’s basically buying 10 000 shares of presto industries or something else yeah and he’s sitting there beating me up and uh so it wasn’t it wasn’t playing as much of a game it was a game tool yeah for him or i think and i think he was kind of proud of me because i he basically taught me a lot of stuff along the way so he was like he was still directors yeah and so being your mentor he was still maybe this he’s still teaching you how to negotiate so like exactly you can look at it from he’s beating you up or he’s still teaching me how to negotiate quarters of a cent on a sale or yeah my dad when he brings me over there i was maybe 15 or 16 and i

was basically cleaning electric meters it’s a little silver and i get as a kid getting paid you know 10 cents a pound for whatever comes out yeah it was kind of nice the only thing my dad said is hey try to ignore the language you’re going to hear here because it was about the first time i got to hear on some of those words that all these guys oh yeah you’re doing as a kid experience all the garbage coming out of the mouths is a great experience well i’ve said this before but if you want to if you want to deal with all walks of society in the scrap industry we get them all right you get the guy that’s a multi-multi-millionaire who looks like he has zero dollars into his name you get the multi-multi-millionaire who looks like he’s a billionaire you get the roughest the drug addicted the just the average joe that wants to clean out his beer cans you get from a to z and i pretty much got along with all of them uh-huh you just which is relationship it’s a it’s a super

relationship when you mention you don’t know there was uh a gentleman we’re doing with he basically right off the farm with the overhauls probably about uh maybe five three uh three hundred pounds heart attack waiting to happen he was in those days i shouldn’t say those days but uh a lot of people walked around yards and they always carried a lot of cash yeah so you go in and basically just buy the scrap and they get it reasonable all of a sudden he’s in one day and we get a call he gets a heart attack i get a call from the hospital hey can somebody come here he was carrying 15 grand okay in his pocket that we had to hold for okay and said what who carries this kind of money around well when he goes in he’s able to buy at a cheaper price yeah uh basically my job my father’s job with louie phillips was going out to the auto wrecking yards and basically offering so much money and they do it every spring or they arrange the different yards and they go in and basically buy out the yards any

of their insulated copper the motor blocks and of course i’d go with my dad he’d be doing this on we’ll be going out to these auto wrecking yards on saturdays and sundays and that was this whole function they pay so much and then the equipment comes in flattened the cars and it wasn’t done like you were paying so much per ton or well i’ve had i’ve heard my dad tell the story a lot when he was growing up is they actually had to rip all the seats and all the garbage and out of the cars to make it clean material to send it to the steel mill or whatever before they had all these gas shutters and that used to have uh they’d burn the cars okay actually burn up okay and then they’d basically rip the frame off and then they put them into a iron baler and then make bundles so they make it like a sheet but like a number two number two and then they cut the frame up frame off hms okay and then they just kind of basically separate the whole car and now that’s kind of the

shredder function correct it does that in the downstream and on the back end and those days i’d sit at the alligator shear and cut the plate scrap into two foot by two foot pieces oh yeah one of the hardest job is in northern minnesota is working the shaker table outside in 20 below weather you’d have a little barrel there with uh with wood to try to keep yourself warm and pick off the stuff that’s coming off of the harris i’ll give them a little plug on their shoes yeah no we had an old hair share yeah well they’re a 702 i’m not sure if that’s the number yeah we had an old guillotine hair shear and then we had a 500 i think before we bought our sierra 7 700 um we had then we ran that we bought that one used and we ran that one for a long time and those old sheers were pretty freaking dangerous i mean they were compared to the we have nowadays who really thought of safety down there i mean i can tell you i got it clipped in the chin a few different times so

by you riding around with your dad going to auto savages and you know just going out and you learn you learn the material you learn how to talk to you pay me a dollar an hour to ride with them in the truck you learn how to buy you learn how to just you know what what has value what doesn’t i mean that that gives you a huge and i learned i learned about battery acid at the same time a battery spilled in the truck seat and i thought i’d be so kind and i’d wiped it up with my butt until you definitely wound up at the hospital for a while yeah i didn’t know it quite burned that so did you know at an early age did you know when you’re in your you know 8 10 i mean did you always know what you’re going to do or did you do you know pretty much i was like well pretty much it was i don’t want to say it was the easy way out it’s just something i grew into and knowing that i had this business to fall back on yeah i

did not apply myself as much as i possibly should but again uh all family functions this is what was discussed and my children growing up basically go to different outings uh the institute of scrap would always have you know the at least up in the upper midwest uh the meetings included family okay so everybody would come with their kids and everything else i don’t know if they liked her or not or my wife because i’d be my territory was north dakota south dakota the upper peninsula of michigan and stuff like that and i just take my wife and toad yeah and the kids and we’d be making stops along the way even if we were kind of going on vacation yeah i just like to see and visit yards and there were very few yards that ever did refused to meet with you could just knock on the door oh come on in so my wife says can we just go on vacation somewhere and not stop at its graveyard and i was like i i mean we could that go but what fun is that you know like for her she doesn’t like

that and for me i mean in your job capacity you were buying scrap from these yards and or at least you know creating contacts and creating relationships and me i don’t our company we our focus has never been to buy scrap from other scrap yards i mean we really just work on um small dealers and commercial stuff and um and that’s kind of more our wheelhouse but that doesn’t ever stop me from if i see a scrap yard or drive by one or we’re in where at whatever city we’re in i’m like where’s the scrap yard like i want to at least go check it out and even if it’s just a drive-by i’ll go do a drive-by and she’ll just be like really every time sometimes you used to drive by just check what the other competitors had it in 100 yeah i just want to say i just want to see what’s going on you know i mean when we go to east idaho her and i because her parents live east from here about four hours we have but if we go east from here we have just uh

we have four yards so i’ll stop i’ll be like she goes this should be rhett a four-hour drive and you make this into like a seven hour drive and i’m like well yeah i mean we’re on the way she’s like it’s not really on the i’m like it kind of is for me but i want my kids to see it i want them to to get a taste of it whether they decide they want to be involved in it or not like that’s i really want that to be up to them but i want them to know how much i like it i want them to know like how good the industry’s been to me and then if they decide they want to get involved great if not go do whatever the hell you want to do yeah like my son i mean he he ate it up he he learned everything i uh like i say uh his first job uh i was looking for a job for him and uh when i called up american iron metal out of montreal they said what a twofer we’ll take you both so that’s

where his first taste of the scrappiness was and from american iron and some other places along the way i’ve managed to really travel the world and visit scrap yards whether they were in italy or even in israel i’ve been to a number of the arts in israel and purchased scrap out of israel or out of europe to go to china and like i say one time i actually bought recycled battery sows from israel and ship shipped them by container back to montreal wow so when you to go back up a little to go to back up a little bit when you you were at omni when you left omni where did you go after that i went to a company called sturgis iron or metal okay and that was in sturgis well south bend indiana southern indiana and sturgis michigan so what people think of surgis they think of what south dakota or whatever like where the baby you know sorry i never thought about you right they do but the one you’re talking about is actually in just a small town and uh northern and uh over the border of indiana into michigan

and i was just i just pulled it up here a little bit a little bit ago because you and i were just talking about that and this wasn’t while you were there right but this is that’s when they built they built the biggest shredder um in the united states which got to be able on the history yeah on the history channel so when you went to sturgis that was that was the name of it at that time that was his name okay and you went to sturgis and what was your kind of what did you do at sturgis uh well sturgis i basically took over all the all the non-ferrous sales and directed the sales people with pricing okay and still buying scrap i had customers that followed me from 1978 and this is already getting into about 1990 1991 that have followed me for 30 years wow and again it’s like it’s it is strange because you don’t get to see them like now as much uh but it was all pretty much by phone you did a lot of phone i mean you did not have the internet for communication and

here just as i just digressed to a story my first cell phone i believe i bought in 1986. was it the suitcase one no what had happened i rented a suitcase one uh-huh uh i was out of town and it was oh nice oh for five dollars a day you can have a phone in the car nice okay i i haven’t been able to make a deal with that because i was selling some copper up into wolverine copper to canada that i know was happening it was going to be a big deal so i really wanted the communication yeah all of a sudden i go back tommy and i had to give my bill the bill for the three days was 600 didn’t know that it was like two and a half to three dollars a minute yeah on top of the red top so what i actually did you had a choice back there of the motorola flip phone or mitsubishi had the diamond tell which wasn’t a flip okay and uh i i made a deal with them i said i’ll buy my phone you just pay the bills yeah okay

you know what a cell phone cost back then one of the small cell phones go ahead twelve hundred and fifty dollars and i’m trying to figure out what sort of idiot says you’ll buy his own cell phone really for company business yeah and they just pay the bill you know after a long time you start yeah why did i do that uh but actually my first experience with the cell phone was back to my family business up in duluth where my uncle had one of the motorola land to sea phones in the car oh wow so when i’d go visiting him stuff i’d borrow the car and you know kind of roll down the window hey i got a call for you yeah and use that so i mean but the 1200 was an investment obviously but how much more business could you do once i had a cell phone kept it and once i had that one cell phone and some people who do know me and stuff i started out two cell phones yeah it was it was kind of funny because i’ll use that omni at that point they actually were

they actually started tracking calls in and out and i’d make my little call sheet that i was doing and i’d go down to the research hey how many calls kind of handled oh about 100 110 and that wasn’t even all for my cell phone that was just stuff coming into the office so i’d basically working between a couple cell phones and the other phone and yes would i get things confused once in a while yes not an older age here i’m down to one phone there you go so i don’t make the same mistakes and leaving the other phone on so people can hear the conversation how long have you had this phone number you have right now i’ve had this phone number for probably uh 25 years that’s that’s great i was telling somebody their day i’ve had the same phone number since the day i started which is 16 so i started full time after i graduated college i have 2004 so for 16 years at least i’ve had the same phone number uh my last year college so 17 years and a lot of it is because our business is so

relationship driven once that phone number’s in your phone and it’s put it’s everything’s good to go you never know who’s going to call you from when or that they’re like oh i got an item i might know a guy that can exactly move this for me right so that the phone number has significantly more value than the actual phone like the phone i don’t care that number is crucial very crucial yeah because then somebody can get a hold of me that i might not be thinking about but they might know that i have the capacity to do xyz i was thinking about my grandfather and the you talking about the phone calls and so my dad and my grandfather at different times would dispatch all of our trucks on the hauling side so they could never be away from their phone and they always had to be the phone or did they have the radio no well yeah but they can never be away from the because we have cbs but in the trucks but they could never be away from the actual land line because you have you know customers coming in that

wants you to move a little lumber or you’ve got your guys saying we need to move this load of scrap whatever that is so you always had to be pretty tied to that landline it was kind of tight to the office yeah get up one of the other benefits i had like i say since the family been in there i’m still doing i’m doing business with this some of the same consumers my grandfather dealt with that’s awesome 80 years ago so which is amazing to me uh and a lot of the mostly foundry stuff like mostly like locals mills or brass and makers some of the aluminum smelters and things like that yeah how has that foundry business changed over the last let’s say since the 90s 80s like what have you noticed well a lot of them don’t seem to like to use scrap as much okay unless somebody can guarantee what chemistry chemistry and that was the biggest thing was learning the chemistries and the different alloy numbers i just spent time in my early days just reading and making sure i would know what somebody could use and convince them that

there’s enough of a savings yeah to use it but you know again it depends on a metal urges one story briefly is alcoa or some of these other consumers dick and sue copper so whether it was copper shot or copper chops in the beginning and there was one particular plant i went to to visit i said oh no we don’t use any copper how do you not choose a copper well our maintenance people and our metallurgist doesn’t mind all the insulated wire and stuff they pull out they would use for the copper units oh just very smart there yeah yes saving money yeah and i think in the beginning a lot of places used what they called copper shock but all copper shot was taking bare bright copper pouring it over water and making uniform bbs yeah so why couldn’t the places just use a uniform chop so i think a lot of plates have gone to chops have replaced what was used to be produced as shot and some because somebody asked me the other day and i never really you know looked too far into it but they were saying why don’t

you make because you we we have a chopping line they said why don’t you make like 25 pound bags and sell it to as diox or deoxy sell it to copper edition competition to some of these mills and i’m like i i just i’m sure people are already doing that you know i mean not a lot uh we actually when i was at uh t-gen out there or shine brother slash we actually did have a bagging machine and made the 25-pound bags okay are you still doing it to this day you know that i don’t i don’t think so yeah i mean we’d be shipping it down to louisiana there was one particular plant that wanted the bags they had to be 10 pounds or whatever that weight is interesting to do it you got paid the extra to do it okay and but again it’s the way the metal emerges at the plant i mean some people are a little more creative and some people just want what they want and will not look at any and they’re they’re willing to pay the extra because they don’t want the guys throwing

in the 25 pounds or no they don’t want to shovel the bag they don’t want to have to shovel or keep track and have it already measured so you don’t have to uh nobody has to guess so there’s significantly less foundries now oh yes and there was in the in the 80s and 80s and 90s and the other thing with a lot of foundries was pay terms not not disparage or just like the steel mills today yeah i mean who get who wants to wait 120 160 days for them you must have experienced that more oh yeah i definitely and it’s the only industry that if the market goes up you have to fill in or yeah we were just talking about this last night i’m like man i want to be what business can i get in that if the market goes up you don’t have to fill the order and if it goes down i can tell you sorry the price is down i have no idea where that came from and i don’t know if scrap dealers ever would run in a revolt or if we’ll get in trouble for even

having the conversation conversation it’s but it’s still it’s one of those deals where you’re like hmm it must be nice the other thing is that i grew up was trying the confusion i had between gross ton and net ton yeah you figured the mills already in these days bye-bye the metric ton yeah or that short time the long time the metric ton the growth somebody tells me they’re paying 160 a ton uh hello and as naive when i was doing some of the iron oh that’s a gross top shoot that wasn’t as good as the price of the 145 net yeah you might as well knock 12 percent off that deal and then that’s what you’re really going to get yeah so from the foundry business i mean after you you um left omni and you went to sturgis um sergius you’ve uh you went to actually i slept in a game or you know i know before i basically wound up at a place up in flint michigan lorebeck metals which was out of montreal since my wife was from montreal and that’s one of the reasons i handled canada i i

was up there pretty much for all the jewish holidays and i just developed relationships with a lot of the canadian dealers okay to sell to and buy throw and in those days you had naranda you had wolverine copper another company called metals and alloys which yeah basically bought out uh wabash alloys is one of those companies that bought up metals and alloys okay and it’s funny i’m still doing business with some of the same people that they’re with different companies now yeah yeah because i think once you’re in i was i was having this conversation the other day once you’re in the business some you know you might try and get out first but you’re once you’re in it’s hard i’ll give you the story i think it’s hard to get out i think my son knew when he was about nine years old he wanted to be in the scrabbies i can’t find the letter but he wrote you know in grade school or something they say who’s your hero or whatever and in part of the conver the letter context said yes i want to grow up like my dad and get

paid for talking on the telephone that’s how he saw it just talking on the phone i uh i’ve always known i was going to be in the scrap business my whole life right i grew up going to the yard when i was a kid i was all my friends were pretty jealous i i was one of the only kids that could take a bb gun to my dad’s work shoot all the windows out of the cars and that was a great thing to do i mean hey in my business we used to have demolition derbies at the yard yeah you know some of these cars would come and running and we’d just be able to run them into a pile yeah or uh i learned how to drive in the yard on a with a two ton on a two ton old school with a stick shift stick shift i mean a shitty seat i mean just but that was kind of how that and a three wheel forklift three will heister with that nasty oh with the single wheel in the back that was all manual uh the west end one is up

there we had were three floors okay the bottom basement was for the heights okay okay for the beef hides and the deer heights you have to salt them yeah i’d have to take my clothes off when i got home yeah cause i bet i stuck pretty good and the top floor so we’d be bringing that little heist or whatever up and down in the elevator like a fredo like a freight elevator to put store stuff up above those hyzers were gnarly like those things were and they never let me ride the skinny tires like i mean those things are so tippy i mean but back in those days the other the only other option was a barrel cart oh yeah if you’ll have to even remember that i don’t know you’re basically loading semi trucks with a a barrel cart it had a little hook you’d hook yourself on the 55 gallon drum hold yourself back and wheel it into the truck yeah get off and go get another barrel and do it without the forklift we loaded our first containers with that three wheel i mean just trying to jam in containers with

that three-minute thing it would just smoke and barrel smoke out of that container and we’re just jamming stuff in that in those containers with that little three-volt forklift so after montreal after montreal to aim uh actually after uh montreal i uh i teamed up with one of my oldest customers residual materials at the time and they had a joint venture in china so for a number of years i was basically buying stuff again around the u.s and other stuff and we had our own facility to take it into okay and now and that was able to bring me back to uh minneapolis okay which was my hometown and uh my father was getting older so at least in the later years there i was able to be in minneapolis spend more time help them out but then my children move moved into ohio so that’s why i’m up in ohio right now so you’re kind of following the your children following the training in the industry yeah and now you have one one of your sons down in texas right he’s got his own yard is that the same one that

when he was nice i was the one who wanted to say he wanted to get paid for talking on the phone i like it so when you’re at aim which is a pretty big out big scrap outfit it’s itself i mean you would similar somewhere yeah it’s i basically been able to maintain a book of customers and pick up new ones along the way yeah uh i’ve always been kind of friendly yeah and pretty much an open book oh pretty much an open book yeah within reason people within reason look i can throw a sling a little once in a while yeah that’s a that’s a scrap uh mental scratch somebody who knows me i’m on the phone with them they know whether i’m giving the truth or not and the problem is sometimes i’ve been told eddie just keep your mouth shut i share a little too much information i’m backing up a little bit one thing that actually probably changed the industry and there was uh one person out in massachusetts uh i believe it was glickman scrap but he said he’s worked in older valleys i’ve worked my whole life knowing

who to sell to who to buy through and all of a sudden this little thing called peony yeah comes up and all the information’s right there yeah and all my customers know what the stuff is worth so in the beginning i think peony definitely was one of those things that kind of changed the industry and i remember getting the peony on our fax machine and every day and we would look at that and then then eventually it would come to our email and peony still exists today and i would assume there’s still a fair amount of people that look at it or else they wouldn’t still be trying to hustle up business but that’s where the internet changed all the dynamics of our industry the information that people get on the market now yeah whether a farmer or anything else they know where the markets are i mean there’s some specialties but they know where the comex is they know where this but back when it first started the only way you got your information was through that we had a telex yeah so you’d have to be sending talexes back and forth you

wouldn’t get an answer on your sale for the next day and in those days uh they had limits on copper trading which was maximum five cents per day so when you’re in a down crash everyone’s out of the market until you somewhere get it goes down to 15 or 20 cents okay nobody wants to get catch the falling knife exactly yeah but the information that just it was a little easier especially when from buying purposes because you didn’t have such a informed which i think and that’s where it comes back down to there is no the internet i’ve heard people say this and i believe it to be true is the internet takes out the middle man it basically squeezes because it takes the information and now everybody’s operating on a very similar somebody’s going to have you know there’s people here or if they have an old order if they have an old order or if they have a really good home for something and they built but it still comes back down to the relationships right yes and with the peony a lot of people felt the broker is going to get

cut out well you know and some people don’t like to sell the brokers some dealers say i’m going to sell to the mail because if i have to discuss anything it isn’t myself which was as a broker and as a seller i like brokers yeah they do the financing if you want fast money you need to get your money and they take the risk in case a business is good it goes under so i do seen that yeah i do i have no problem brokers are fun to deal with well and here’s the thing they serve a purpose they do 100 serve a purpose and i do a lot of business with brokers i do a lot of business with mills i there’s it’s just like anything like there’s a reason that there’s a square no shovel there’s a reason why there’s a pointage shovel there’s a reason why there’s a big shovel there’s a reason why it doesn’t mean that it’s not a shovel it just means that there’s somebody has a position and they’ve taken the whole mill out of a certain position yeah so you may only have the broker and

again today these brokers are really somewhat what uh i believe they consider merchants because they’re doing toll conversions okay they’re putting the scrap and taking out whether it’s siding coils or mlc coil or whatever it is so they got they can sell it to those end users and they got a premium to do that sometimes there’s in the premium they’ll just sell the scrap but it’s kind of nice when you’re can put material into a place and take material out because you’re not at the same risk yeah and you you because it’s your inventory exactly you still get access to the inventory and i remember somebody you know back when before st when steel crashed in o8 somebody was you know they were talking about uh they had sold a you know a ship load of uh hms to a rebar meal and turkey or something and it was one of those well we’ll just instead of sending you money we’re just going to send you a boatload of rebar back right at that point what do you do i mean you’re either you’re gonna take the scrap back and at that point the

market was coming off 200 200 a ton you know in a week or you just take that sacrifice to shipping come back or do you take the boatload of rebar back because the ship it already helped you can sell it it’s already there yeah you kind of have to just you know lick your wounds i guess but the toll side of it makes 100 no that makes a lot of sense you’re taking the you’re taking the ingots about the sals back out you’ve got a home for those um and you’ve got somebody else yeah you’ve got somebody else committed on the back end of that contract so i could definitely see the value the value behind that yeah i mean that’s they said brokers brokers are in my opinion if they’re good they’re very you know relationship driven they understand like what your needs are as a customer and this isn’t just like brokers and scrap like this is brokers and any truck or freight whatever it is they they’re they’re there to service something that you decided it’s better to deal with them than deal with the other parties i when i was

at i’ll use the exam when i was a down at sturgis i just didn’t have a real logistics department and i was doing brokering and even getting stuff moved out of our own yards i used a broker and i really used the broker and i’ll give a shout out to rob winick but uh basically i said here’s my customers here’s what i bought here’s where it’s delivered set it up that was the information i gave him yeah he didn’t like guys it’s kind of a bit of a pain in the butt and i know it cost me a little extra but i didn’t want to have to make that phone call to the dealer is the load ready is it not ready yeah and then finding the truck and then if it doesn’t deliver on time i have somebody else to blame well it goes like it goes like this your time every minute of your time every hour is worth x amount to you so if i can make more money calling on customers securing more scrap while you deal with the logistics and it costs me an extra hundred dollars a load

or whatever you take care of it you take it i don’t want to deal with it you take care of it i’m getting my materials getting delivered picked up whatever it is and i’m able to focus my energy on my customer my my relationships there’s there’s just that’s just one small example where a brokerage can provide a ton of value all right a heck of a lot of value yeah it just and again i wasn’t always most detailed so you may have have to call and double check with a few oh just call them and get the po number yeah you were detailed when it came to the percentages and what you’re buying what you’re selling but maybe not the actual details of the the freight or exactly or maybe see that you know sometimes i’ve had the air where you know you’re brokering something and uh the address happens to be where the company is that i’m working for yeah and all of a sudden the logistics or the trucker picks it up and now i’m finding it delivered somewhere else yeah rather than where that had to be and then you have

to deal with that issue you don’t like a lot of headaches no no well because we’re naturally we’re going to get headaches in our industry no matter what so you’re trying to eliminate as many as possible because they’re going to come in all forms and do you miss something like i said i was traveling with a guy visiting a few of his different yards somebody asked me to do an appraisal type thing and he’s watching me with the two phones buying this or selling that anything just ask me questions how do you keep track of that because he knew i wasn’t writing this down stuff down i said well if i forget somebody’s gonna remind me a bottle of copper trouble and i’ll just say okay i and i’ve done that yeah wait where’s my order oh okay i’ll send you the order well when you were telling me you know last night some of the volumes and some of you know what you know as far as what some big outfits back in the day were moving i mean you you just telling that story here a little bit ago there’s a guy

in the 80s that’s sitting on a million and a half pounds of copper you just oh yeah but he did the funny thing with the phillips he’d always sell out his inventory in december almost all his inventory and he’d go to florida for three months oh and we have to ask you because with aluminum i know if you’ve kind of followed over the year you know at the end of the year in december nobody really wants inventory and the pricing isn’t actually the the best and i’ve generally found it over the years the aluminum price generally is two to four cents better come january or february yeah but he just was under that thing i’m gonna go to florida for the three months and sell out his inventory just so he didn’t have to worry about it and then rebuild the inventory which is similar to some of these publicly traded companies that they’ll move inventory when they when they’re quartered before their quarter ends and they’ll move it at the price that it is the time because they want to get that on the book for the quarter yeah for the money you

know they want to get the the sale on their books and say okay we have excel and we put this towards the bottom line and this that to make a quarter or a year look good and the guys that are out there they’re with it they they should be able to probably get a penny or two the other thing that goes along with that i’ve never understand the scrap i’ve made too much money this year and it’s october i’m not going to sell any scrap because they don’t pay more taxes i never understood lifo and fifo yeah it was always was always lasting first out as a weight if the markets were done you don’t want to do it then i started with the other thing is how about this what if you ship me the scrap and i just show you it’s in my inventory for your tax purposes yeah and i’ve seen companies that have done that here i gotta i need so much of this inventory for lifo or fifo and i’ve been with a company where they actually sent me out to buy material and let them keep that material

but put it in our name and we buy and resell it to them there you go because well i mean think about it let’s say if it’s if an item’s a dollar and you you sold it today and it’s towards the end of the year whatever it is and then it moves a penny or two but what are you paying on that from a tax standpoint if you get back those years you’d be having to pay 70 80 percent exact taxes i mean i don’t think it’s that bad now it’s not but still you’re still anywhere from 10 to 30 right depends on state and feds and all that but if you can move it and because and because you can’t you can predict maybe this month or at least have a rough feel for it on the ferris or whatever side but you can’t predict 2021. so i think people are willing to take the gamble push it into the 2021 and say i’ll take if i make some money early 2021 then if the rest of the year is then at least yeah i’m not gonna you know pay a bunch of

taxes again i’ve never been one to have to worry about the debts or how those things go but i’d be arguing with people what do you mean you don’t want to sell it yeah aren’t you in this business of selling and buying and selling and buying yeah it’s so great that oh don’t have hey and it’s funny i got some dealers up and up in the dakotas i mean hey they haven’t sold their copper since it was the four dollars a pound yeah four and a half right four or four and a half whatever we reached and they’re still holding every pound but i call them and while brasses haven’t changed too much or electric motors you know even though the market’s gone up 20 cents the motor price is still about the same so at least move the stuff yeah that doesn’t have the upside potential for you then it was so funny the last time we were getting up towards that three up i’m gonna sell when it’s three dollars well well we’re 310 now even recently yeah well no 3 15 3. now got and now i had one guy call

me back and we were back down to three why didn’t you sell it to me when it was yeah 310 uh-huh i i sometimes i mean there’s a lot of old school in some and there’s still a lot of old school in our industry i mean it’s it’s still i mean there’s handshakes it doesn’t go to waste in other words it’s still sitting there and you know what i think there’s a lot of people that if they could put a million dollars in the bank or they could put a million dollars of copper in the in their warehouse and they don’t say need the cash per se they have the space and they’re just a more um physical like they want to be able to see it touch it smell it when they walk in and know that there’s a million dollars worth of copper in that warehouse because today if you put a million dollars of cash in the bank and you earn a 0.02 on your money it’s not even worth putting in there and i think that a lot of people will just put that scrap in their warehouse

and be like that’s good enough another thing that kind of changed the industry besides peanut is the fact when a lot of scrap companies old scrap companies their children didn’t they didn’t want their children in the business become a doctor an accountant a lawyer or whatever and then they had to start hiring professional people who actually took a look at costs and that’s trained tremendously because of these bigger companies they have to turn their inventory yes it’s not like they you know you can talk to them no no no copper’s going up another fifty hey we were down to two dollars hey yeah i said hey we’re gonna you know we went from 328 back down to two dollars and struggled our way back up and uh they keep turning no matter what and they don’t want to hear putting to the side and how much of that has changed where people are starting to hedge more right i mean when did the hedging really get to become a big part of the scrap business from your perspective well from the copper side it was pretty much almost always there the major merchants and

brokers had to do that one of the things i always did is i like to i like to buy high and sell low didn’t make any sense but obviously when the markets go down the differentials or the spreads get tighter enough yeah or you go you know wider uh so hedging’s been a part of me you know you know full time since about 19 i can’t how can you take an order and sell if you don’t own the stuff but you at least you got to spread yeah you may be at risk for the spread differential but at least you’ve protected yourself and the idea is to be almost a net zero yeah and they’ve done this with aluminum and you know more and more the mills did that and they started in the late oh in the late 80s doing that and pretty much i would say 100 no i can’t never it’s never 100 but 100 a good portion of the mills now all go up and down yeah and those brokers that took positions last year at such and what was really personal opinion was the widest differential between prime and

scrap grades yeah ever had been it’s kind of like locking in business for the year of number two copyright 45 under yeah which which you wouldn’t do yeah now they’re chasing to fill these orders and they’re trying to buy it as cheap as they can but just to fill it and get it off the books off the books yeah i mean it’s great on the out to do it you know quarterly one of the things i i tried to do with and again being fairness with with industrial accounts and they were always off of the american metal market or the iron age and sometimes the american metal market wouldn’t change their prices at all yeah so when i was with sturgis where we handled a lot aluminum i got friendly with the guy on the desk at am hey you haven’t lowered the price yet this spread isn’t this big but if but it was in my favor yeah i wouldn’t make the phone call yeah so you’re back so those guys unless they’re you’re showing a business large companies i i convinced them that hey let’s do it quarterly and when the spread

gets too out of whack one way or the other we’re gonna negotiate say here this is the differential i want my five percent profit i want this and it and it worked nice then you readjust the price because pretty much a lot of times on that formula it’s kind of uh a win-lose situation for one side or the other yeah but they’re big corporations they don’t care even if they’re selling it at the lower price because they’re buying against a certain formula exactly right they got the volume to support it but i just did not like being upside down no i just when you’re talking about you you’re buying five 10 15 containers of copper and brass and you know you start or more and then you start you start doing the math on that and then especially the swings we’ve been having lately where you get you know big swings i mean that’s you know that’s the difference of making money and losing a lot of money you know one of my first copper deals uh was with halstead metals which was in wynn arkansas i just started it was maybe 78

79 and i was dealing with a company called diversified which basically spread out to be other people out of st louis that was there and i have three loads of green line copper okay they’re going down the the first load gets rejected okay and i’m saying what am i going to do well you know i’m going to fly down to wind and just see what the problem is instead of saying it’s rejected and the broker says here we’ll take it to this scrap dealer he’ll charge you five cents a pound and three where i want it as a first beginning i just wanted to know what the uh situation was so i go down there and uh i find a scrap dealer about 10 miles from the plant have a conversation with them martin snyder’s and he says you know you’re the first person that’s ever stopped in here to ask if i would do that because they were taking them to major processors either in little rock or memphis yeah so he takes in my load i of course it was hedged or i sold it at a fixed price or whatever first

load gets re all three basically to make a point all three loads got rejected i’m i’m learning well we tied the green line coils with aluminum or the way it came right out of the utility or copper-coated steel was used yeah to wrap the coil and then sometimes they’ll they’ll mix it like they’ll run off off a spool they’ll run copper copper copper and all of a sudden they’re running yeah copper clad and it’s the spools cost me 1250. for all three loads and this is when i also learned different than the iron business that uh they don’t mills at least the non-first don’t really reject for market going up or down you know oh no no the market went down and you’re just yeah hitting me like that so uh actually my rejects i turned around and sold for more money because the copper market came up yeah the ones that he did so they didn’t they they didn’t actually fix the price until you actually do so that’s what i started doing later a lot of times is why do i want to have to ship into a place with

a fixed price and be worried about the market because if you’re hedging i can ship it if it gets rejected i don’t have the the market loss per se yeah because it hasn’t been priced so the spreads up or down you could even cancel an order and they could buy back the market would you recommend like smaller recycling companies hedging are you just recommending hedging for you know your medium to larger probably your medium to larger yeah i mean the small one like i say those guys well here the guy in the dakotas i was talking to him uh last week or the week before he says oh yeah i finally you know had some time to clean up stuff yeah i just found underneath my aluminum pile seventy thousand pounds of green line wire and spools my dad wouldn’t even know that because it was from his father who had passed away it was sitting they buried it under some other material which means i came back and i talked to he said oh there was more than 70 000 pounds can i find seventy thousand pounds of green lime wire in my

heart somewhere that they hit it okay and again i don’t know that was in his aluminum inventory for his tax purposes or not back to taxes back to taxes so you wouldn’t recommend like i mean we’re not a huge um you know scrap processor in the whole yeah yes you are when you’re talking your chops and all these other things you are would you recommend the company our size to hedge i would probably say yes you have to take a look at your own positions and then you got to take a look what do you consider in your position i even considered the insulated copper as part of my hedging position okay because if you’ve got insulated copper you know what the recovery is yeah you know you’re not going to have it for three months and all of a sudden you take a look and copper’s you know 320 out there hey that’s a pretty good price i don’t mind locking that in so you could actually take x amount of contracts yeah and take your time to do it and you went three months out or four months out and you can

do it on stainless steel about one nickel contract contract’s good for about three truckloads of 304. okay stainless i convinced somebody to do that one year and instead of doing with me he just did it with another stainless company but still but it’s it’s protecting yourself i think is foreman you got the investment but isn’t that expensive no it’s not but does it take away part of the part of the scrap business and i guarantee you can attest to it you know whether it’s true or false but there’s a there’s a it’s a form of gambling in our own commodities like there’s a there’s a gambling aspect to what we do oh they love it i mean it’s i don’t i just excuse me not without no risk it is to a certain extent right like you’re you’re small operators like us like it there is a a portion of it that you know i i don’t have to go to vegas and pull slots right like i don’t i enjoy go play 21 i enjoy playing pie gal poker i enjoy sitting around the craps table like i do it recreationally because i

enjoy the gambling you know the aspect i like to go to vegas and bet on sports but generally speaking like we gamble so hard every day doing we do that there it there is a component of that that the hedging kind of takes out of the business right it basically does take some of your risk up yeah so but again a lot of people like that risk yeah uh the other thing is sometimes you sit there and say well you know geez they’re not paying enough for this product you know you’re just down on the bottom of something and you know where the spreads have been historically and everything else and you say hey you know i’m just going to put that stuff down i mean when they’re paying 20 cents a pound or 23 cents a pound for stainless steel yeah you might say i’m going to just lay it down make a pile yeah it’s not a huge investment yeah exactly from the cost but you know i’ll keep moving the other material yeah you pick an item or two that you want to just keep making absolutely yep for sure you

can’t gamble on every single item and our business i mean we need cash flow it depends yeah we pretty much um we we try and move our inventory as quickly as possible that’s just the nature of how we do it now we don’t hedge so we try and move it in but you can i mean whoever you’re selling to you can basically lock in you can lock in the price point half a load first that was one of the good thing i was able to do with some people is here you want to sell me 10 000 or 15 000. hey you go hedge it you go i go for them via the market how you’re the market they want to know i give them open pricing yes and uh was you know running out with you know 75 advance which i had to do because if the market goes too far the wrong direction yeah you’re marginalized i’m the one yeah you’ve got to call and keep it keep it going right but i you know it’s an option that people can use i mean here copper sitting down here where was two

bucks and you guys say here you know something we’ll head you off next march six months down the road and it’s more higher in the future that’s what we’re doing the biggest thing that comes into some yards to have that option is if they know whatever happens to the copper market whether it’s three months out or five months out they’d have to sell that stuff anyway yeah so the biggest convention free up warehouse space yeah convert to cash and you still own your material yeah makes sense yeah but you cannot the one thing i have it’s very difficult impossible to hedge any particular brasses for the ingot makers because it’s strictly a supply and demand so you’re just hedging the copper using the copper this is all you can read like bronzer anything that has high yeah no value the basics the way the mills buy they’re buying on the intrinsic values and a percentage of the intrinsic value so much a discount for copper so much a discount for zinc and i can’t worry about the copper more than everything else yeah you know it’s a protection plan so i’ll switch gears a

little bit on you so how many how many you said you have three sons you showed me a picture yes yesterday right any daughters no daughters so three sons are they all three in the scrap no no one’s uh just one is a lawyer and the other one’s an uh an artist and he’s uh basically a manager of graphics for wendy’s corporate okay and that’s why they’re both in columbus they just the two kids just found out in uh in the market there yeah and then you have the other son that’s in uh texas texas and here this is this is a peony story okay what i was working with uh shine brothers and uh i’ll shout out some names mark chas now it was basically with venture metal okay they picked up versatile yeah uh which i i’ve done some business with venture good but mark and those guys uh i get a phone call out of the blue oh is it shine from peony nothing peony but market got my name off of peony yeah so i was running them into a mill you know chop load after chop load after chop

load and when my son had left uh american iron he basically wound up with those guys moves to dallas and eventually gets married i mean if it wasn’t for peony my son would have never managed to get down in dallas yeah and get married it was just kind of like one of those those small things small world that’s kind of how that deal goes so your prediction you’re you’re super well-versed i mean i in this industry and i’m not going to hold your feet to the fire too hard or anything just just make a guess where do you see because i mean as much as you bought non-ferrous and everything else i mean the reason you came to visit us is to give us some knowledge on this on the brass end of ours yeah you reached out to me and i thought it was hey kind of neat enough and you know what and that’s why i said for me like i i’m beyond appreciative so that being said what’s your your take what’s your your outlook where the copper market is going well basically i was looking for 325 before

the end of the year and probably c350 or better next year china was kind of stagnant there and now they’re stepping up and there’s definitely an oversupply material and even in the chopping business with everybody having choppers now there’s an abundance of chops that didn’t exist before yeah uh and again due to the elections or the stimulus or whatever is happening that puts a question into it as far as i see the market there’s news every day the question whether the news is positive or negative whether there’s a strike at codelco or there isn’t the mar the bulls or they pick up some news to run one way or the other so i kind of consider the market kind of like a river flow with its ebbs and ties yeah that it’s nothing totally pacific it’s just you know sell on the rumor or how they used to say yeah buy the room or sell the room and sell them yes type of deal type of deal but it does seem or appears we were headed that direction and i find the markets periodically whether it’s on the downside or the upside it tries

to take out its last low or take out its last high and the the last real high was really pretty much around 325 they got up to 321 and change yeah i mean it did pop up that’s one thing with hedging always put orders in above because some people did get this stuff off at 3 28 or when you mentioned 450 it was like a one day deal yeah you know through four and just shot up the other way but what i tell people is like so 450 sounds great but the spreads at that time you know on the chops was like i think it was on number one it feels like it was like 30 cents uh historically you know the number two spread when we were up and around that thing uh was somewhere up around 60 cents under yeah 60 was around 30 and uh number one was 45 or something uh-huh and i was telling somebody they did they’re like 60 cents i go yeah but at 450 you’re still like almost four dollars but if your head she’s got an issue yeah or if you locked in spreads

just like whether you did with the aluminum and you got yourself in a bad deal yeah uh one time i hey i know from the high of the market you know bear bright was running three to five over number one was running two to three under and number two was running uh 10 to 12 under um so it in particular at a time like that i say i might just want to sell for the next six months i mean when you’re at a historic kind of spreads you’d like to find somebody to lock you in for a number of months which which was able to be done but you look back at the market only in 2001 we were down to 63 cents on comex yeah to realize that it was like that so i had a situation with a guy i’m not going to sell my copper why would i sell my copper at these prices well i i said here here’s the deal you got three million pounds of copper in your warehouse it’s 63 cents a pound these are historic spreads and i said here when you want either i will

replace the copper into your warehouse or you can have the option to price it yeah because if you such spreads and you can imagine what you if you if you locked in for a year at 15 or 18 better spread than anybody yeah it’s it’s kind of but you got to realize where what you’re getting paid the spread just hate it’s just too wide things might get better yeah it makes sense it may not but when you’re looking at historic locations i do believe that once they let this is just my two cents on it is i i feel that once the election has run its course next week we’ll know i think maybe maybe not we’ll know the direction but i think that it’ll take some of the guesswork out of it and then the chinese are going to be huge consumers of coffee and i think that india is is going to be a huge consumer of copper and still all they are today and they’ll be even more and you still have japan and korea japan korea plus our us as a country and as as people even transition even if

it’s a slow transition into alternative power right um which is whether it’s solar or electric you name it i guess that is those are big copper drivers and at some point by being able to produce um chops i think that now that gives you the the chinese option where if you were just an insulated seller maybe you did you that option kind of went away for a while or the spreads got too wide for you which is what which is what made me make the switch but um i didn’t like the spreads but i think that there’s going to be a pretty good demand for copper which should push the price if we get a beat down and it switches around because six months or seven months ago when the china was out and the u.s wasn’t so bad the prices in europe shot up and a lot of people didn’t realize that the mark was seven or eight cents moving into europe then moving into china or moving in the united states yeah it’s a little more difficult to grasp when they’re talking again when you ship stuff over there sometimes you

got to wait 120 days until it gets delivered and different things yeah and understand i mean even some of the red brasses and again they look at the percentage of what they have to pay for copper and they will pay more for red brass with the copper and 10 units than the chinese were or the u.s people and it’s kind of like can rotate between north america europe to the far east when something gets out of whack well and there’s no refineries in the united states anymore yeah it was kind of you do refine that type stuff but you’re seeing i mean and you’re seeing they’re starting to people are starting to come back around and it’s kind of like everything out of style in style like there’s a couple refineries copper refineries being built right now right there was i just heard the news the news they’re they’re they’re in the process of of dialing it all in right one over there in the midwest if i recall i believe there was yeah so i don’t know how far it’s developed along the way but they’re they’ve been talking about it so

going back to you when you’re talking about the electric vehicles uh uh this last february was in over in europe for a meeting and uh basically they said by 2025 all europe’s going to be electrical vehicles no more basically getting rid of the indus the combustible engine situation and that was going to basically obviously cause an increase for the use of copper and nickel for the electric vehicles like an additional 14 percent yeah for copper usage so that’s that’s going and then if you look at some of the ways some of the us is speaking they’re going to be going to the electric vehicles and and that’s just one they got expanding the mileage i mean if you’re a salesman on the road i don’t know exactly how yeah an electric car but i mean everything is becoming battery yeah i think hydrogen is probably the way that that deal is going to go just from a horsepower standpoint but who knows i mean things happen every day on the back and people are working on new stuff well it’s nice well or for me is just it’s there’s always something different yes that’s

this business does not get boring yeah and when you think you knew it oh crap i guess it was wrong about that one yep well i will say this i’ve learned a lot in the last 24 hours and i appreciate you coming in and sitting down and inviting me and you know what i know you were telling me last night that you were writing a book when you write the book book and i this is like my way of holding your feet to the phone yeah write the book yeah when you write the book we’re gonna bring you back okay and we’re gonna talk about the book and because you are a book of knowledge in our industry and you’re you know it’s guys like you that men that make me love what i do thank you so thank you for i just love the scrap life i appreciate it man thank you thank you take care bye-bye