/biz/ - Business & Finance

April HRC steel futures ended at back at 889 now! That's up from a low of 774. I still think we are in a bottoming phase and will have to watch what happens with China, but the local mills seem to be starting to be passing on price hikes and the futures markets are pricing that in. Also some capacity came offline for maintenance, not a ton of capacity, but enough where when people are getting lower inventories and demand for steel based products is still strong. Analysts thought bottom would be in May, but, I think sooner!

>>58102903
>Damn sad to hear... Is it possible to make synthetic diamonds that go into the hundreds or thousands of carats?
They are pretty impressive now, I think they can make just about any size within reason. I don't know the details but the only way even jewelers can tell them apart is by looking at the lattice structure under a microscope at a very high power. My friend mostly deals with gray market watches but he went to diamond school and basically only gets them if he has a customer asking him for them at this point.

The other problem that has arose with the diamonds is fear of wearing them. There are some places in the world it is safe, and for sure controlled places (country clubs, very nice neighborhoods, etc), but, a lot of husbands don't even want their wives with some giant stone because they don't want to see them get wacked over the head over it. On the really expensive necklaces insurance companies also have coverage limitations, so some people with those 250,000+ valued items have to put their insurance company on notice to wear them and otherwise keep them in a safe. These days some of the richest people mostly self-insure, but, it's still one more hurdle.

I honestly think the watches are going to be next. Some of these very high dollar watches are getting targeted by bus boys and waiters in restaurants where they'll tip off a buddy outside who will mug you when you leave.

https://archive.is/u2S9g

Interesting article on low-emissions steel making. The easy road is mini-mills, but what I think we're going to run into in the US is that the dependence on scrap (recycled steel) to operate them is going to cause shortages of the input materials.

>The hardest industrial processes to electrify are those that require intense heat around the clock, especially if they use fossil fuels not only to generate heat but also to provide some sort of chemical necessity—such as the carbon used in steelmaking. This is the most experimental end of the spectrum of electrifying industry, but also potentially the most rewarding, since steel, chemicals and cement together account for more than half of industrial heat and thus for a similar proportion of industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

>Several well-funded startups are pursuing radical innovations in aspects of steelmaking, one of the world’s most polluting industries. Electra, which is backed by Amazon and bhp among others, has found a way to make pure iron in a fire-free furnace. A picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator—who met a molten end in a steelworks—glares down at researchers at its laboratory in Colorado as they dissolve iron ore in a chemical cocktail and zap it with electricity. This “electrowinning” technique produces pure sheets of iron without using any coking coal or fossil fuels and so emitting hardly any greenhouse gases. The firm is chasing rivals including ssab, from Sweden, which plans to commercialise green steel by 2026.

>>57699679
>which stocks? ai can literally affect any industry right now.
Agreed, yeah that's what I'm saying. AI is such a buzz right now that if it should faulter, it could push the total market downward and give us some buying opportunities. Sometimes we get some lucky periods where liquidity issues or total market panics cause a pull out on even businesses that aren't effected by whatever triggered the fear.

>>57412531
Thank you.

Steel HRC ended at 1077usd today, scrap at 475. I believe this downward movement in scrap will cause steel to drop as well.