Insight Blog: Have the iron ore bears got it wrong?

摘要

Commodity forecasting is a difficult business at the best of times. Even the most sophisticated "all-singing, all-dancing" supply-demand model cannot account for a myriad of imponderables. These can include weather events and environmental factors, operational outages and disasters, government policy changes (especially in China) – and heavens above, a global pandemic. Granted, there is always a crystal ball element to price forecasting. But in the case of key steelmaking raw material iron ore, analysts, consultants and industry experts, and often market players themselves, have consistently got the price outlook wrong – typically on the low side.