Daily Market Note — 2026-08-19

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

The read

A quiet day in the ferrous price itself, and a noisy one in the instruments used to measure it.

Turkish deep-sea scrap did not move. Across four independent published references for the same date — the US-origin index, two general assessments and a Baltic-origin quote — every one printed flat, and a fifth publisher’s Turkish scrap index edged slightly lower. Meanwhile the exchange’s own closing reference for Turkish scrap moved to around $382 a tonne, roughly $3 above the highest physical assessment.

That gap is the session. A futures settlement is not a cargo — it reads how sellers expect September to look, not what prompt material is worth today. Four assessors looking at physical transactions found nothing to change; one exchange found forward sentiment firmer. Both can be true at once.

Key moves

Pakistan produced the session’s only real price movement. The published shredded import index for Port Qasim rose $4.44 to $417.33 a tonne, up 1.08% — a new high for the series, taking out the late-July peak and erasing four consecutive easing prints in a single move.

Worth reading carefully rather than as a breakout. Imported material is firming while Pakistani domestic shredded sentiment stays weak — together, a replacement-cost story rather than a demand story. Mills have been well stocked and resisting higher asks for a fortnight, and a firmer index inside an unchanged offer range is the assessment moving to the top of a band that has held, not the band moving.

In India, containerised European-origin HMS 80:20 was assessed at $334 a tonne CFR Nhava Sheva, up $4 — a second consecutive daily gain. The discount to Turkish bulk narrowed to about $39 from $43, but entirely from the Indian side, since Turkey was flat everywhere. Nothing has cleared on that leg in a week; an assessment drifting toward the offer side in a market with no bookings says more about seller resolve than buyer appetite.

Alang’s ship-cutting plate assessments were refreshed, confirming activity in India’s demolition market — which competes with heavy, plate and re-rollable grades, not shredded.

Freight and shipping

Hormuz traffic fell to six commodity vessels on Tuesday against a ten-day average of eleven. Composition matters more than the count: the day’s traffic included an empty very large crude carrier entering from the Omani side — a ship repositioning to load, not trade flowing.

Two caveats. This daily series has now contradicted itself three times in eight sessions — the same Monday reported as both six and nine vessels — so read it for direction, not precision. And the durable evidence is behavioural: major shipowners continue to avoid the route for want of any signal it has normalised, and two large Chinese state shipping groups have kept their tankers out of both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb since late July. Three weeks of sustained withdrawal by state operators is harder to revise than a vessel count.

Bab el-Mandeb improved — 30 weekend transits against 19 the prior week — but with no tracked Saudi oil shipments at all. Volume returning while a specific high-value flow stays absent is rerouting, not restoration.

Brent traded around $91.44 and WTI around $85.45, holding above $90 for a second session. Iraq announced mechanisms from 1 September to lift crude exports via routes avoiding Hormuz, and Saudi loadings have partially resumed from inside the Gulf. Both are adaptations to a constrained corridor rather than a reopening of it, and neither lowers a container rate.

Nothing has left the carrier surcharge stack in more than three weeks. The peak-season charge to Pakistan holds at $300 per 20-foot and $500 per 40-foot and high-cube box; a Northern Europe congestion charge at $500; a Middle East fuel surcharge and a $35 per TEU operations charge both stand. On a 28-tonne box a $500 charge is $17.86 a tonne; on 25 tonnes, $20.00. That $2.14 gap frequently exceeds the price concession under discussion — achieved payload is a commercial term, not a logistics detail.

Supplier markets

Rhine logistics remain severely constrained at record-low water around Kaub, with navigation past the chokepoint heavily impaired and inland cargo dependent on road and rail. No fresh gauge this session, so last week’s picture stands — including a European exporter paying up at the dock to fill a vessel it had already sold, the signature of a seller short of deliverable material rather than short of price.

The consequence is unchanged: port-adjacent supply in the Low Countries is better placed than inland German material whatever the yard price says, and the useful question to an inland supplier is not “what is your price” but “what does the road or rail leg cost, and is the material already at port.”

Non-ferrous snapshot

The exchange’s official settlements for 18 August put copper cash at $14,335 a tonne against $14,080 three-month, zinc at $3,795 and $3,724, and aluminium at $3,219 and $3,234. Lead traded around $1,845 and nickel in the mid-$16,000s.

Two things in that line are worth more than the levels. Copper cash fell $515 in a single session, and its backwardation — the premium of prompt metal over three-month — roughly halved from $535 to $255. A price that moves that far between two consecutive settlements is the entire argument for same-day pricing on copper-bearing material.

And aluminium has flipped into contango, at $15 — its widest of the series and now the only metal in the complex trading that way. Exchange stocks remain reported at exceptionally low levels, which is a genuine fact; but a market truly short of prompt metal does not pay to defer delivery. Warehouse scarcity and yard scarcity are different things.

The general point, again: cash, official settlement, closing price and three-month are four different references. A contract saying “LME copper” without naming the exchange, the tenor, the report and the settlement date has left its most important term open — and whoever fills it in later will not choose against themselves.

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 of grades 1 and 2; the most traded bulk ferrous scrap.
• Cash vs three-month — metal for immediate versus three-month delivery. Cash above three-month is backwardation (prompt tightness); below is contango.
• Index vs deal tape — an index is an assessor’s view of the market; the deal tape is what actually traded. They diverge, and the divergence is informative.
• Payload — tonnage actually loaded into a container. Per-box charges divide across it, so a lighter box costs more per tonne.