Daily Market Note — 2026-08-11
Market commentary on the global ferrous scrap trade. Not trading advice.
The read
Tuesday delivered something the market has been short of for a fortnight: actual transactions, and an actual number for the Strait of Hormuz. Both point the same way — the deep-sea scrap market is firmer than the commentary around it, and the shipping corridor that everyone assumed was quietly healing is not.
The distinction worth holding onto today is between an absence of reported deals and an absence of deals. Those get conflated constantly, and this week they came apart.
Key moves
Turkey printed four bookings and the index moved with them. After three assessment dates frozen at $375 a tonne CFR, the US-origin assessment rose $2.93 to $377.93 — its first move in a week and a fresh high for the July–August recovery. The deals underneath it:
- A western Turkish mill bought US-origin HMS 1&2 80:20 at $375.50 CFR — the first US-origin trade above $375 in three weeks.
- An Iskenderun mill booked ex-US at $375 with shredded at $395, for September shipment; a second ex-US cargo at the same level was reported but unconfirmed.
- The same buyer took an ex-Netherlands cargo at $371, and a further Netherlands booking at $370 concluded late last week.
Two things follow. First, the index is again running ahead of the tape — $377.93 assessed against $375–375.50 transacted, a gap of roughly $2.50 to $3. That is the same configuration that preceded a $2.76 downward correction in early August. Second, the two origins are meaningfully apart: the US-over-North-Europe premium has held at $7.48 for four consecutive assessments, and market participants reportedly believe European material is unlikely to find buyers above $373. A single headline “Turkey price” flattens a market that is trading in two places at once.
The exchange curve returned after two sessions of silence. The August contract settled at $376.50, against a last-observed bid/offer of $370 / $375 on Friday. Worth noting because the August bid had been sitting exactly on $370 when last seen, and the question of whether it had broken lower was genuinely open. It had not — it went the other way, through the prior offer.
Pakistan produced nothing. No published bid, no fresh import figure, no domestic rebar print. The most recent picture remains an import shredded reference around $410–415 CFR with a transaction confirmed toward the upper end, and June scrap imports of 323,896 tonnes — now roughly six weeks old with no July data. Against a Turkish market that moved on four cargoes, the silence on the demand side is the more conspicuous fact.
Freight and shipping
The corridor was measured for the first time in four sessions, and the number is the story. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz fell to six vessels on Monday, against a recent ten-day average of about eleven.
Put that beside the figure from exactly one week earlier — six vessels on the preceding Monday — and the week in between takes on a different character. That week produced the most encouraging political headline of the entire episode: reports that Iran was nearing a final agreement with Oman on new shipping lanes. Monday traffic did not change by a single vessel.
It is worth being careful with the two numbers, because they are on different bases: six is a single day, eleven is a ten-day daily average. The honest description is a corridor that is volatile rather than recovering — and the latest observation sits below its own recent average, not at it.
On the carrier side, nothing was withdrawn. CMA CGM’s current Pakistan schedule confirms active Port Qasim and Karachi services via regional hubs including Jebel Ali, Mundra and Colombo. That is genuinely useful — but service continuity and cost normalisation are different things, and only the first has been demonstrated. Published measures still in force on relevant trades include MSC’s $500 per container Northern Europe congestion surcharge, CMA CGM’s emergency fuel surcharge, and Hapag-Lloyd feeder and contingency charges. One forward date remains live: a North Europe inland fuel component scheduled to expire on 14 August. Inland relief is not ocean relief.
Supplier markets
Low water on the Rhine is now a duration problem rather than a headline. Water levels are at record lows and affected barges are operating at roughly 20–30% of normal capacity — the same figure reported a week ago at the critical Kaub gauge. A one-week squeeze is a freight event; an unchanged one becomes an availability question, and one German collector has suggested mills and export yards may face reduced allocations into late September.
This splits the European market in a way that does not show up in yard prices. Inland German material can be expensive even where the posted price has softened, while port-adjacent Benelux supply carries no barge leg at all. Anyone comparing origins on quoted yard prices alone is comparing the wrong number.
There is a genuine tension in the reporting here worth flagging rather than smoothing over: European steel and aluminium scrap prices were reported softening despite the freight squeeze, on weak demand — while export FOB assessments at Rotterdam and in the UK both rose $2.93 on the same day the Turkish index moved. Both can be true. Domestic prices set by mill demand and export prices set by constrained inflow are not the same market.
No verified live dock buying sheets were published for the UK, the US East Coast, Germany, the Benelux or the Baltics.
In ship recycling, India was reported gaining momentum on a first-week-of-August basis. That is a current-rate observation, which makes it harder to reconcile with earlier reporting of Alang arrivals at historic lows than a half-year total would have been. Demolition supply competes most directly with heavy, plate and re-rollable grades, and barely at all with shredded.
Non-ferrous snapshot
LME: copper $14,152/t (+$60), aluminium $3,320.50/t (+$40.50), zinc $3,721/t (−$11).
Aluminium is the story and it is being under-reported. It set a fresh high with its largest single-session gain of the recent run, and it has now outperformed copper over the past week — up 3.4% since 4 August against copper’s 2.0%. Most commentary still ranks aluminium below copper on tightness. The tape has disagreed for a fortnight.
A note on copper references that matters more than it sounds. Copper is quoted in dollars per tonne on the LME and in dollars per pound on COMEX, and the two exchanges are not currently trading at the same level — US warehouses hold a large share of visible global stocks on unresolved tariff policy, which has bid the American contract to a premium. A copper number quoted per pound is not the London number, and on a metal-bearing scrap parcel that distinction is worth real money. Ask which exchange, which tenor, and which publication time — and write it into the contract.
One correction worth recording, because it cuts against the bullish case: the DRC concentrate-export headline that was widely cited as the driver of last week’s copper high has been substantially qualified by the producer itself. Ivanhoe Mines noted that restrictions on unbeneficiated concentrate have been in place for years and that Kamoa-Kakula has historically received derogations. The price move was real; the explanation attached to it was thinner than it looked.
Glossary
- CFR — Cost and Freight: the seller covers goods and shipping to the destination port.
- FOB — Free On Board: price at the loading port, before ocean freight.
- HMS 1&2 80:20 — Heavy Melting Scrap, a standard blend of 80% HMS 1 to 20% HMS 2.
- Index vs cargo — an assessed price reflecting judged market level, versus a reported completed transaction.
- Origin premium — the price gap between material from different source regions for the same grade.
- LME / COMEX — the London and US metal exchanges; they quote in different units and can trade at different levels.
- Backwardation — when metal for immediate delivery costs more than metal for later delivery, usually a sign of prompt tightness.
- Kaub gauge — the shallowest reference point on the Rhine, used to judge barge loading limits.
- LDT — Light Displacement Tonnage, the basis on which ships are sold for recycling.