Daily Market Note — 2026-08-16

Market commentary on the global ferrous scrap trade. Not trading advice.

The read

For nineteen straight sessions the honest summary of container freight into Pakistan has been that nothing moved — no carrier withdrew a surcharge, no lane was requoted. That ended this weekend, and it ended in the direction the risk data had been pointing all along.

Maersk’s Peak Season Surcharge from North Europe and the Mediterranean to Pakistan took effect on 15 August: $300 per 20-foot dry container and $500 per 40-foot dry, 40-foot high-cube and 45-foot high-cube. Dated, quantified, published — a different class of evidence from vessel counts and satellite tracking.

Size it against payload, because that is how it lands in a delivered price. On a 28-tonne container, $500 is $17.86 per tonne. Stack it with MSC’s standing $500 Northern Europe congestion charge and a North European box now carries roughly $36 per tonne of itemisable surcharge before the base ocean rate is quoted — before CMA CGM’s Middle East fuel surcharge and any Hapag-Lloyd emergency charge on affected feeders. Any delivered offer quoted all-in before 15 August is now short.

Key moves

Ferrous prices did not move, and could not — a weekend, with no price-reporting agency issue either day. Turkey’s public direction reads stable rather than breaking out, and no credible weekend deep-sea cargo has been identified that resets the physical market. Last observed prints stand: the US-origin Turkish HMS index at $375.24/tonne on 13 August data, the general assessment frozen at $373.25 for a fourth session.

Two things follow. A claim of firmness with no cargo behind it is a claim, not a market — the standard is a named physical transaction, and none exists. And the forward curve that appeared Friday near $379.50/tonne is absent from today’s data entirely; a reference that appears once and vanishes cannot support a price conversation.

Pakistan’s Europe-origin shredded assessment refreshed this cycle, but the value is not exposed publicly. Thin spot liquidity there can make a published assessment look stable while executable bids move underneath it.

Freight and shipping

Only two vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, with no visible crude-oil shipments, against more than 130 a day before the war. An increasing share of regional traffic runs with transponders dark, so that figure is a floor on what can be seen rather than a measured total.

More concretely: Yemen’s Mocha port has suspended commercial and maritime operations after more than 25 missile strikes, with seven deaths and about $16 million in reported losses. A closed port removes capacity rather than repricing it.

Brent settled Friday near $88.52 a barrel. US–Iran talks remain stalled.

Supplier markets

The Rhine has fallen to a level that changes the sourcing question, not just the sourcing price. The Kaub gauge hit 6 centimetres late Friday and 8 early Saturday — against roughly 25 centimetres in early August, a level already forcing barges to 20–30% of capacity. Most affected freight has shifted to trucks and trains.

Stop asking what the barge costs; ask what the road or rail leg costs, and whether material is already at port. German inland material now carries a rising, largely unquantified inland leg. Antwerp and Rotterdam carry none.

Note what has not happened: German and Austrian domestic scrap fell 3.5–5% in the week the river hit its lows. Constrained logistics only supports price when demand is holding, and European summer shutdowns emptied demand faster than low water emptied supply. Elsewhere, Canadian domestic ferrous weakened in parts of Ontario and Quebec.

Non-ferrous snapshot

No Sunday exchange session, so Friday’s officials remain the reference: copper around $14,545 a tonne, aluminium around $3,248, zinc around $3,875.

Worth carrying: at 70% recovery against that copper reference, gross contained value in a cable parcel is $10,181.50 a tonne — before processing, freight, taxes, finance, inspection and margin. A gross contained figure quoted as a price is the most common way a cable parcel gets overpaid for.

Glossary

• CFR — Cost & Freight; the quoted price includes ocean freight to the buyer’s port.
• HMS 80:20 — Heavy Melting Scrap, an 80/20 mix; the most traded bulk ferrous scrap.
• Peak Season Surcharge (PSS) — a temporary per-container charge carriers add in high-demand periods, published separately from the base rate.
• Forward curve — exchange prices for future months; a view on what a month will cost, not a record of what traded.
• Recovery rate — the percentage of saleable metal actually obtained from a mixed parcel after processing.