Daily Market Note — 2026-08-14

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

The read

A quiet tape and a loud shipping lane. Ferrous scrap benchmarks were essentially unchanged, with the Turkish import market holding the mid-to-high $370s and no reported deep-sea cargo resetting the prompt level higher. The day’s real development was in the Gulf, where attacks on two vessels operated by a national oil company sent conditions in the Strait of Hormuz sharply worse and left traffic far below normal.

That combination — flat cargo prices, deteriorating logistics — has defined the last fortnight. Freight risk keeps rising without yet showing up as higher scrap prices, because the demand side is not strong enough to absorb it. Where it does show up is in the widening gap between what suppliers want and what mills will pay.

One caveat on today’s numbers: no major price-reporting agency published on 14 August, so the ferrous levels below are carried from the most recent prints rather than freshly assessed.

Key moves

• Turkish import scrap (LME August futures): approximately $376/tonne, effectively flat against $376.50 earlier in the week. Futures, not a physical transaction.
• Turkish physical, last assessed: deep-sea HMS 1&2 80:20 references sat around $373–377/tonne CFR, unchanged across several sessions.
• US raw steel production: down 2.7% week on week, with capacity utilisation easing to 78.8% from 81.0%. This reconciles precisely with published weekly mill-output data.
• Weekly scrap survey (7–13 August): steel scrap flat, copper scrap flat, aluminium scrap mostly lower, zinc scrap higher, stainless flat.

Freight and shipping

The Strait of Hormuz remains the dominant variable in delivered costs to South Asia. Attacks on two vessels operated by a Gulf national oil company marked an escalation in the kind of shipping being affected, not simply the number of incidents — this is traffic that had been treated as relatively insulated.

It is also the first such incident inside the strait itself, following earlier events in the Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Oman. Transit volumes remain far below pre-conflict norms, though vessel-tracking data has become less reliable as more ships operate with transponders off, which means published counts understate actual movements.

No carrier has withdrawn the congestion, emergency fuel or war-risk surcharges introduced earlier in the summer. Buyers and sellers alike should treat any expectation of freight relief as unconfirmed until a carrier issues a revised rate in writing.

Supplier markets

European supply remains constrained by low water on the Rhine, which continues to limit barge payloads and favours port-adjacent material in the Netherlands and Belgium over inland German tonnage. UK supply gains relative appeal for the same reason.

In Pakistan, the electricity-linked sales-tax mechanism applying to registered steel producers remains in force. It is best understood as a cash-flow and cost item for the mills concerned rather than as a mechanism that automatically lowers what they bid for imported scrap — there is still no published evidence of that transmission.

Non-ferrous snapshot

LME cash references on 14 August: copper approximately $14,545/tonne, zinc $3,875, aluminium $3,248, lead $1,846 and nickel $16,575.

Copper remains the firmest leg of the complex. Zinc holding above $3,800 supports the metal value in brass-bearing scrap. Aluminium slipped back below $3,300 after a brief run to record levels earlier in the week — a reminder that a rally which round-trips within days reflects momentum rather than genuine scarcity.

Note that these are cash references. Cash and three-month prices can differ materially — copper’s gap was around $175/tonne earlier in the week — so any scrap formula should state which exchange, which tenor and which publication time it settles against.

Glossary

• CFR — cost and freight; price including delivery to the destination port.
• HMS 1&2 80:20 — the standard heavy melting scrap grade, 80% HMS 1 to 20% HMS 2.
• Cash vs three-month — LME prices for immediate versus forward delivery; the difference matters when a contract settles on one and is hedged on the other.
• Backwardation — when the immediate price sits above the forward price, usually a sign of near-term tightness.
• Capacity utilisation — the share of a mill’s production capability actually in use.