Metal Monday #7 with Nick and Brett, February 15, 2021

Nick and Brett discuss this week's wild weather and how extreme weather affects scrap flow. Make sure to stay tuned to Metal Monday for our outlook on scrap pricing!

Transcription

all right welcome everybody we are in the middle of february is february 15th we are doing another zoom metal monday how you doing brett i’m good man i’m good i can’t uh complain just uh i’m over in eastern idaho checking out what we have for uh material in the yard and saying hi and that’s what it is well everyone that listens to this is not from idaho we got some snow finally we haven’t got snow all year really officially upon us and uh i don’t see how much snow we got at least in caldwell and boise but it looked like eight ten eight to ten inches somewhere like if i had to guess yeah and then um it was awesome me and me and the girls and my nephews are in town and we built a snowman they went sledding we had this big dirt pile behind our house like where they’re going to do some more land development so we went sledding and we just haven’t done any of that all year we haven’t even gone like you just got it crazy it’s been a real weird weird winter where it’s almost felt

like spring this whole winter and then finally now we’re actually getting we’re actually getting that weather yeah yep yep so what does that do with that weather what does that do to the markets right you know i don’t know what the markets um were moving around this morning obviously the precious metals platinum platinum silver were up you know um copper was up again like four cents last time i checked yeah it’s kind of hovering in that range still up four um i mean we’re at our highest we’ve been since 2012 on copper which is crazy what is it along that to me i don’t know i really do think that the base metals are going to keep coming up i think that we’re going to see some big some big pricing moves next few months on you know some of the ferrous items i think we’re going to hack what we lost in february it might take us a couple months to get it back maybe it won’t but i feel like this winter is really locking up scrap flow it locks up flow into your yards for sure but it locks up your

ability to transport what you have to the steel mills to the export yards to the shredders it really hampers your ability to get out and do jobs midwest i mean tech everywhere for the most part in the u.s is fate is facing the same winter issues that we are so i think it’s going to be it’ll be interesting to see if the steel mills get caught a little bit short this month or not you never know so one thing i’ve read is some people think we’re in the beginning of a super cycle yeah um do you believe we’re in the beginning of a super cycle where we’re gonna see things just go absolutely bananas like you know maybe 450 copper maybe you know north of four at least i believe you can’t print the amount of money we’ve been printing i believe you can’t lock down the way we’ve been locked down as a country for a year and not some pent up demand for building infrastructure not create like inflation of some sort whether it be a hyperinflation or regular inflation but i can’t i don’t i just have a hard time

in my gut thinking you can do all that and not see commodities prices go higher yeah everything in me says that commodities prices are going higher and so i have a hard time you know not thinking super cycle hyperinflation all that it’s hard to know until you’re in the middle of it yeah but i think we’re going to see better pricing i mean and it makes just better pricing because our purchasing power is going down but you know like we’ve said before we’re not afraid to put scrap in our yard right now we feel like that’s a good investment at the end of the day if you’re cash flush and you know you’re not worried about you know making payroll you’re not worried about keeping the lights on or whatever else what else are you on right now are you going to bet on you know putting your money in the bank at zero percent interest are you gonna bank on you know if i can buy scrap right now in a tough market or you know whatever i’m gonna put scrap on the ground i mean at least i can look at it

you know at least i feel like there’s something there so when was our last super cycle 2012 if you get like technical that kind of was getting ready for the olympics and they really bought hard for a while and really pushed it um 2012-13 is when you’ve seen 450 copper yeah so uh you know good good iron good iron pricing but on the ferris side it really it was 2008 is when you saw peak ferrous pricing good copper pricing but not what you saw in 2013 yeah yeah for sure well so we’ll have to we’ll see if we’re in a super cycle you know yeah uh i hope we are i’d love to see some good prices we’ve we’d love to share that with our customers because they’ve been loyal and it’s time to reward all those guys and get them some killer prices you know i agree man goes around comes around just keep your head down keep pounding that’s all we do all right all right all right brett save travels on the rest of your trip appreciate it thanks