富国银行：加拿大钢铁报复性关税无关紧要

I know you just came back from the biggest steel gathering conference in Atlanta. And just just looking some of your research from it, it feels like there is this continued optimism of elevated prices. You're a bit more cautious. Why? Sure. I think that you've come off of a really strong year in the last twelve months or so. The stocks have doubled in many cases, and you had steel prices explode. Much of that was due to the 50% tariffs that were put in place a little over a year ago.

They affected the market on a lag, and demand was a little better than expected as well. So I think there is a snowball effect of enthusiasm, but it's really hard to replicate that kind of year after what we've come off of. And at these prices, we're talking around $1,200 for hot rolled coil in The US. It's high enough to attract imports even with a 50% tariff. So we think that it's really hard to argue for much more upside from these prices.

The question is more, can we hold on to these high prices in light of some of the seasonality, some of the imports, and more capacity coming on domestically? And indeed, prime minister Mark Cunning has pledged to support, to offer support in the face of these tariffs. Do you see that causing any impact to pricing at all? So if you're referring to Canada putting on its own tariffs against The US, it's it's pretty irrelevant.

It's it's very much for show as many of these kind of announcements are. So Canada has been a net exporter to The US. Canada had been subject to the same 50% tariff as the rest of the world, whereas prior to, the latest Trump moves in the past year, Canada and Mexico were excluded. So that caused some animosity among other things, obviously, between the two countries. And I think that, actually, Canada doesn't have that much impact on The US anymore because Canadian prices have already risen.

So the Canadian steel industry should be keeping their tons in Canada because Canada put its own barriers on import in place. So the countries are becoming less dependent on each other. So in terms of getting exposure to this, you prefer Nucor and Steel Dynamics over the rest of the pack. Why is that? Well, what we did is, run some analysis of our past years where steel prices did roll off of their peaks. And in light of that, when steel prices, retreat, you often see either the stocks retreat or the highest quality names hold up better than otherwise.

So we're looking at that past behavior and thinking that those names have a bit more resilience in addition to the fact that they both have a very interesting free cash flow inflection into 2027 with large years of CapEx rolling off. So that should be an opportunity also for them to have some additional gains into next year. And how about aluminum given or aluminum, as I should say. It's a good value. Thank you. Thank you.

What what are you seeing there, and especially when it comes to things like the AI boom and the impact that that might have? So the aluminum market has been much more muted than the steel industry. I think that the price volatility in aluminum has been completely different. Of course, steel is more of a physical market, and aluminum is more about buyers and sellers of the LME. So the aluminum market ran up with oil, but since then has retreated.

And there seems to be increased concern in the aluminum industry about new capacity coming to market in Indonesia, funded by China, but not in China, and other markets where China is funding new capacity. So the aluminum market is more tentative. Our view is that aluminum prices will be stronger for longer, and part of that is because of higher energy prices. So higher input costs, aluminum is about 30% electricity, where, therefore, that should keep prices high.

But, the aluminum market, we think, is offering even better value in the stocks that we follow than the steel industry right now.