Daily Market Note — 2026-08-13

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

The read

Thursday’s biggest ferrous number was a freight event wearing the costume of a demand event. The US East Coast export index rose 2.3% while the Turkish delivered price it feeds printed exactly zero change. Both facts are true, they are the same fact seen from two ends of a voyage, and only one of them is about scrap.

In non-ferrous, the useful information was not a price at all. It was a curve — and the curve reordered the complex.

Key moves

Turkey froze, and a floor got tested. The general all-origin assessment was unchanged at $373.25 a tonne CFR for a third consecutive session, and the US-origin index printed $377.11, 0.00%. No fresh deep-sea booking reset the market. More telling than the flat line: mills spent the week pushing for EU-origin HMS 1&2 80:20 below $370 and failed — they agreed to pay $370. A level buyers tried to break and could not is a different thing from a level the market is sliding through.

The US East Coast broke out, for the wrong reason. The New York export index jumped $7.50 to $332.50 (+2.31%), its largest weekly move since late June, on a genuinely strong cargo tape — four East Coast cargoes sold in August to Wednesday, against eight in all of July. But the stated driver is ocean freight falling to $45 a tonne from $50. With the delivered Turkish price static, the implied freight-and-margin leg compressed to $44.61 from $52.11: the exporter captured the entire freight saving as a higher loading-port price. The delivered ceiling did not move. On the other coast, Los Angeles was flat at $323 for a fifth straight week, widening the east–west spread to $9.50 — the widest in this dataset. The West Coast is not weak so much as inactive.

Turkish rebar moved for the first time in nine sessions, the export band lifting to $570–580 FOB. Read which end moved: the floor, not the ceiling. Mills stopped offering at $565; the top has been $580 throughout. And the justification they are using — firmer scrap — is not visible in the scrap tape, which froze. Meanwhile Turkish mills booked 51,000 tonnes of Indian billet at $501 CFR and 40,000 tonnes of Chinese at $495, opening a priced substitution channel that competes directly with scrap.

A monthly figure worth checking, again. A widely circulated summary continues to report Turkish HMS 80:20 at “around $370 CFR for July”, down $10–30 regionally. The daily record does not support it: the general assessment ran $381.50 at end-June to $374.00 at end-July — a fall of $7.50 — and the US-origin index moved barely $1.40 across the month. July ended at $374, and today’s market is higher. This is the second week the figure has circulated; a restatement is not a corroboration.

India stalled and Pakistan stayed quiet. Indian imported shredded references were cut $10 at both ends to $375–390 CFR, with an offer/bid gap of $15–20 preventing any conclusion — the only import deal reported was turnings at $290–300. In Pakistan, no published mill bid or import print emerged, but the destination port produced hard numbers: Port Qasim handled 189,288 tonnes in 24 hours, 160,227 tonnes of it imports, across 3,809 containers, with sixteen ships at outer anchorage. Worth stating plainly, because it is routinely conflated: that is all-cargo throughput. It says the port works. It says nothing about what a mill will pay.

Freight and shipping

The main measuring instrument broke this week. Saudi Red Sea oil exports are increasingly running AIS-dark because of attack risk, which means visible vessel counts now understate real movements by an unknown amount. That cuts both ways and is worth being precise about: a count that rises could be recovery or could be more ships going dark; a count that falls could be deterioration or the same thing. Expect “traffic is recovering” to be quoted off an AIS figure shortly. It will not be evidence.

The better instruments are contractual. On those, nothing was withdrawn for a fourth consecutive checked session — MSC’s Northern Europe congestion surcharge, CMA CGM’s emergency fuel surcharge and affected Hapag-Lloyd feeder and contingency charges all remain in force. One dated item resolves imminently: a North Europe inland fuel component scheduled to expire on 14 August. Inland relief is not ocean relief, and a lapse on an inland leg says nothing about the water.

For scale, a per-container surcharge divides very differently by payload: $500 a box is $20.00 a tonne at 25 tonnes, $18.52 at 27 and $17.86 at 28. Achieved container weight is a pricing term, not a housekeeping one.

Supplier markets

The Rhine story inverted on the price this week, and it is worth getting the direction right. German delivered scrap fell — the E40 grade down €10 to €280 and E3 ex-works down €12.50 to €275, the first move since 20 July, with the month’s decline running €10–15 across most grades. This is happening while low water keeps affected barges at roughly 20–30% of capacity for a third straight session, with the Kaub gauge below its 2018 low and trade associations issuing a joint appeal.

Both are true because they measure different things: the constraint is raising the cost of moving scrap while mill demand falls faster. So the tempting line — European collection is tightening, therefore prices must rise — is not what the tape says. Rotterdam export FOB, for its part, did not move at all.

The durable consequence is a sourcing one rather than a pricing one. Inland German material can be uneconomic even where the posted yard price has softened, while port-adjacent Netherlands, Belgian and UK supply carries no barge leg at all. At three sessions unchanged, the right question to an inland supplier is not the price — it is what tonnage can actually be loaded and delivered in September, and by what mode.

No verified live dock sheets were published for the UK, the US East Coast, Germany, the Benelux or the Baltics — a seventh consecutive session.

In ship recycling, Bangladesh currently leads the South Asian competition — while vessel supply remains limited. Those two clauses sit in the same sentence and reconcile each other: leading a competition for a scarce input is a statement about relative bidding position, not about price level or volume. India is also described as strengthening. Demolition supply competes most directly with heavy, plate and re-rollable grades, and barely at all with shredded.

Non-ferrous snapshot

LME official prices, 12 August, cash and three-month:

Metal	Cash	3-month	Structure
Copper	$14,376	$14,201	Backwardation $175
Zinc	$3,852	$3,780	Backwardation $72
Aluminium	$3,307.50	$3,308.50	Contango $1.00
Lead	$1,880	$1,919	Contango $39
Nickel	$16,725	$16,940	Contango $215

Read the right-hand column, because it is the day’s real output. Prompt tightness exists in copper, and moderately in zinc. It does not exist anywhere else in the complex. Copper’s backwardation has widened from roughly $33 in late July to $175 now — an escalating prompt squeeze, evidenced rather than asserted.

Aluminium fell $65.50, the largest single-session drop of this run, erasing two consecutive record highs in one day, with Emirates Global Aluminium reaffirming its production-recovery timeline. That deserves a correction of something said in this note repeatedly over the past fortnight. Commentary ranking aluminium below copper on tightness was described here as contradicted by the tape, on the basis of relative outright performance. That was wrong: outright performance is not tightness — the curve is. A two-session rally that round-trips in one session was momentum, not scarcity.

One published figure from Wednesday’s note is corrected. This note reported zinc cash/three-month on 12 August at roughly $3,785.50 / $3,728.50, a backwardation “narrowing from $81 to $57”. The correct official pair for that date is $3,852 / $3,780. The true series is $81 narrowing to $72 — prompt zinc tightness eased far less than stated. The general lesson survives the specific error intact, and is if anything reinforced: a metal price quoted without its tenor is incomplete, and here the difference was $72 a tonne on zinc and $175 on copper. On any contract priced off an exchange reference, name the exchange, the tenor and the publication time.

Elsewhere, base metals softened in Asian trading on Thursday, with Shanghai copper down about 0.5% at midday, and coking coal eased more than 1% — a mildly bearish signal for integrated steelmaking inputs.

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.
• Cash vs three-month — exchange prices for immediate versus deferred delivery.
• Backwardation — immediate delivery costs more than deferred; usually a sign of prompt tightness.
• Contango — deferred delivery costs more than immediate; the absence of prompt tightness.
• Billet — a semi-finished steel product; an alternative feedstock to scrap for re-rollers.
• AIS — Automatic Identification System, the transponder network used to track vessels.
• LDT — Light Displacement Tonnage, the basis on which ships are sold for recycling.
• Kaub gauge — the shallowest reference point on the Rhine, used to judge barge loading limits.