/biz/ - Business & Finance

Steel is still going strong in America, but internationally seems to be still trying to find a bottom.

I've been trying to learn about oil rig counts, because oil rigs consume a lot of steel. They not only have permanent steel, but also consumable steel that they have to keep replacing. Super interesting. The rig counts you can find on TradingView, I'm trying to find what they correlate with.

Wow. May HRC steel futures up to 961 today. I'd love to see this break 1,000 soon.

The value of the msci world metals and mining index, which tracks share prices in the industry, has risen by about 10% in the past decade, compared with a doubling in the world’s stockmarkets as a whole. Returns on new projects in the industry are currently around 7%. That is hard to sell to investors when the yield on American investment-grade corporate bonds and t-bills are above 5%. This is what is holding the market down when it comes to investing in metals and mining. This could certainly change, but I do wonder if the focus of this general would be better suited to working on our trading in and out of the markets rather than just investing long term in them. The real money to be made in commodities isn't in holding them long term, but rather trading them.