The ferrous complex is falling apart; it just doesn’t know it yet. Steel prices are collapsing. The spread to iron ore is eviscerating mill profits as inventories pile up. This is both rebar and, more importantly, HRC. It’s so bad that the need for a New Year steel restock is nearly gone. Mills are going
Wall Street was slammed lower mainly led by financials but also small stocks as trade war tensions are keeping most risk markets contained. The USD continues to decline with Yen and Euro both pushing to new weekly highs while the Australian dollar failed to get back above the 65 cent level due to yesterday’s release
The Market Ear wraps us up. Welcome to extreme fear The problem is we have not seen CNN’s greed/fear index hit extreme fear territory and SPX this close to ATHs (chart 2). Source: CNN Source: Macromicro Imagine regional… …goes a bit more “global”? SPX vs. KRE gap getting rather wide. Source: LSEG Workspace Huge gap
DXY no bueno. AUD even less bueno. Gold bueno. Oil no bueno. AI metals are confused. Big miners breakout or false? EM bounceback. Junk not so much! Yields freefall. Stocks need a deeper pullback. Newsflow is whacko, courtesy of ZH. Washington shutdown. Geopolitical risk Weak Macro Hawkish FedSpeak Waller sounded less dovish than normal: “You
Australians have endured the biggest decline in real wages in history. As of the June quarter of 2025, Australian real wages were still tracking 6.0% below their June 2020 level, at roughly the same level as December 2011. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) Assistant governor and chief economist Sarah Hunter warned that Australia’s sagging
AUD/USD EUR/USD USD/JPY GBP/USD Gold WTI Brent Australia 200 US S&P 500 UK 100 Japan 225 Vids
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Asian share markets are still trying to get a wriggle on as the trading week starts to wind down following some potential progress on the rare earth US-China trade war while the latest unemployment print locally is resetting the chances of more RBA rate cuts although the Australian dollar remains resilient against a very weak
The gold boom has many investors asking for more precise ways to get exposure. Today we’re adding a Mid-Cap Gold tilt to our Direct Indexes—so you can target the part of the gold market that sits between physical bullion and the mega miners. What is the Mid-Cap Gold tilt? It’s a rules-based basket of ~a dozen listed gold
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has slashed the official cash rate by 3.0% to 2.5%, which has driven mortgage rates sharply lower. Even so, New Zealand home values have failed to respond, printing another month of zero growth in September, according to the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) House Price Index (HPI).
It may be that we don’t need China to bully us into an Albo tyranny. The Coalition is doing it all by itself. After an acrimonious partyroom meeting in Canberra last week, a disenchanted Liberal MP mused that if seven of his colleagues defected to the Nationals the balance of power within the Coalition would