Daily Market Note — 2026-08-10
Market commentary on the global ferrous scrap trade. Not trading advice.
The read
Monday, and the honest description is that very little was established. No fresh deep-sea cargo reset the Turkish market, no new exchange close had printed at the time of writing, and no published dock sheets appeared for the United Kingdom, the US East Coast, Germany, the Benelux or the Baltics. This is a price-discovery day rather than a price-setting one, and the main discipline it calls for is not carrying weekend numbers into Monday as though they were current.
The one genuinely new development is diplomatic, and it cuts against the way such headlines usually read.
Key moves
Turkey remains range-bound and the anchor has not moved. The US-origin assessment has now printed at $375 a tonne CFR for three consecutive assessment dates, and no confirmed booking has appeared to displace it. North European material continues to sit lower, in the high $360s, with the premium between the two origins holding at roughly $7.50. Turkish mills had resisted further increases at the most recent physical close.
Worth stating plainly, because the distinction gets blurred in commentary: $375 is an assessed index level, not a reported cargo. Those are different things. An index describes where a market is judged to be; a transaction proves where it actually cleared. The absence of a fresh cargo is a reason for caution in both directions — it is not, by itself, evidence that the market has firmed.
No forward curve was published in the material reviewed today. The last observed exchange quotes, from Friday, showed the August contract bid at $370 and offered at $375, with September bid $373 and offered $379.50 — the highest number anywhere in the strip and still below $380.
Pakistan produced no fresh price. The most recent published picture remains an import shredded reference of about $410–415 a tonne CFR with a transaction confirmed toward the upper end, and a weekly reference cut of roughly $5 a tonne on stated expectations of further correction if regional tensions ease. June scrap imports of 323,896 tonnes remain the last official figure — now around six weeks old, with no July data published.
India stays the weaker South Asian destination, with soft July finished-steel conditions and competitively priced domestic sponge iron continuing to cap imported scrap demand. Bangladesh remains cautious. Neither is currently pulling containers away from Pakistan.
Freight and shipping
The week’s most significant development is that a reopening announcement arrived and explicitly declined to be one. Iran was reported to be nearing a final agreement with Oman on new Hormuz shipping lanes, while simultaneously tying any broader reopening of the strait to concessions from the United States.
That pairing deserves attention, because the two halves are routinely collapsed into a single optimistic headline. A technical agreement on lanes is not a restoration of normal commercial passage. Reporting continues to describe low traffic, hostile incidents, vessels going dark on AIS, insurance difficulties and uncertainty about which routes are actually permitted. On the evidence available, the political process has not yet produced normal commercial transit — and the party that would have to deliver that transit has said as much.
No vessel counts were published in the material reviewed today, so the corridor is best treated as unobserved rather than stable.
On the carrier side, nothing was withdrawn. 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 is worth noting: a North Europe inland fuel component is scheduled to expire on 14 August — and inland relief is not ocean relief.
A useful piece of arithmetic for anyone quoting container freight: at 25, 27 and 28 tonnes to a box, a $500 per-container charge works out at $20.00, $18.52 and $17.86 a tonne respectively. Payload is one of the few variables on this lane a shipper can influence without a carrier’s agreement, and three tonnes of it is worth more than most negotiations.
Supplier markets
No verified live dock buying sheets were published for the UK, the US East Coast, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium or the Baltics. Softness in US domestic obsolete grades remains the live question — specifically whether lower acquisition costs have actually reached export yard bids, which is not something an index will answer.
Low water on the Rhine continues to weigh on German inland economics, keeping the comparison between German loaded-container costs and Antwerp or Rotterdam a live one.
In ship recycling, reporting pointed to stronger Indian first-half tonnage. That is a cumulative half-year figure and should not be read as a description of current arrivals — a strong first half is entirely compatible with a thin August. Demolition supply competes most directly with heavy, plate and re-rollable material, and barely at all with shredded or plate-and-structural.
Non-ferrous snapshot
Copper $14,092/t, aluminium $3,280/t, zinc $3,732/t on the LME — all carried from Friday, with no fresh Monday close at the time of writing. Do not read a flat carry as a flat market.
Copper remains comfortably above the $14,000 level reached last week, with tight availability outside the United States the key support. A concentrate-export announcement from the Democratic Republic of Congo was cited as the driver of the recent high, though without published detail. Aluminium is the quieter story worth watching: it set a fresh high on Friday and was the best-performing metal of the past week, ahead of both zinc and copper — a reversal of the ordering most commentary assumes.
For anyone valuing mixed non-ferrous grades, the recurring lesson holds: recovery, assay and the pricing date matter more than the headline metal price, and a blend quoted off a stale reference on either leg is simply mispriced.
Glossary
- CFR — Cost and Freight: the seller covers goods and shipping to the destination port.
- HMS 1&2 80:20 — Heavy Melting Scrap, a standard blend of 80% HMS 1 to 20% HMS 2.
- PNS — Plate and Structural scrap, a heavier, cleaner grade than HMS.
- Index vs cargo — an assessed price reflecting judged market level, versus a reported completed transaction.
- Bid / offer — the price a buyer will pay and the price a seller will accept; the gap is the spread.
- AIS — Automatic Identification System, the transponder network used to track vessels.
- Sponge iron / DRI — Direct Reduced Iron, an alternative metallic feed competing with scrap.
- LDT — Light Displacement Tonnage, the basis on which ships are sold for recycling.