The FT reports:
The deal by Vale of Brazil and Anglo-Australian BHP Billiton with Japanese and Chinese mills marks the end of the 40-year-old benchmark system of annual contracts and lengthy price negotiations. The industry instead agreed to move to quarterly contracts linked to the nascent iron ore spot market.
“The benchmark system has ended. There is [...]

On the other blog: 2010 = 1999 + 1982?.

U.S. Energy Corp. (Nasdaq Capital Market: USEG) issues its annual report. Here’s the full filing, via the SEC’s website, and here are the company’s highlights via its press release. Nothing too surprising here; the investment thesis remains on track since I last blogged about this company. These were the highlights the company listed in its [...]

On Steam Catapult today, revisiting the idea of a crowd-sourced due dilly trip to Perth to check up on Alloy Steel International (OTC BB: AYSI.OB) via a new crowd-sourcing site: Rocket Hub.

This clip is an example of why I stopped watching CNBC. Larry Kantor has no idea what Vitaliy Katsenelson1 is talking about — he’s trying to predict the next quarter, and Vitaliy is talking about secular trends that persist for one or more decades. The producer who decided to pair Kantor and Katsenelson didn’t know [...]

First, John Authers in the Financial Times: How baby boomers lead bear market by the nose. In that column, Authers refers to a Barclays study about stock market bubbles, the gist of which was that equity market valuations were driven by demographics. Barclays found a strong correlation between cyclically adjusted P/E ratios and the ratio [...]