Final Thoughts

I was speaking with a large service center which buys mostly hot rolled this afternoon. We were discussing what each of our opinions were regarding the direction of pricing and how 1st quarter will ultimately come out. In the process this executive (who buy the way will be attending our Leadership Summit Conference) told us there business, although not setting any records was a bit better than expected in December. We heard from a second service center executive who told me earlier this week that their company had a surge of orders/shipments during the last two weeks of December which resulted in their month being up by something like 20 percent. This was totally unexpected.

So, my opinion is that I am optimistic about the industry and I was very pleased to see the 3 month moving average (3MMA) break the downward cycle and move higher for the first time in many months (see Sentiment article).