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 Post subject: What price to watch?
PostPosted: Sat Sep 15, 2018 7:38 am 

Joined: Tue Oct 10, 2017 7:31 am
Posts: 25
As most scrap metal prices are down right now and are always fluctuating.
I was wondering what "board" to watch on the boardsort payout rate sheet to watch to get an overall feel as to how the entire circuit board market is doing.
If a Peripheral Board is doing 1.35 right now it was at 1.40. Does that mean "generally" the market is down that percent.
I cant watch that many categories and remember what was where .
As a part time scrapper I want to get the most for my boards and want to make sure I am sending them in when the prices are the best.
"obvi"


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 Post subject: Re: What price to watch?
PostPosted: Sat Sep 15, 2018 9:48 pm 
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Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2015 6:57 pm
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There’s three things to watch escrap wise.
Peripheral boards and and motherboards are most affected by copper and nickel rates. So they drop when those metals drop and vv. motherboards also fluctuate slightly on gold and silver rates.

Telco boards are most affected by rare earths. The materials that make up ICs. It has very little to do with precious metals (pm) generally. When transition metals are high and rare earths are high, telco rates climb fast. And again vv.

Finally the highest grades like cell phone boards and hard drive controllers have a value based almost entirely on pm recovery. So when gold drops so does cell phone board rates.

Escrap is a generic public term that’s not really used on the materials industry.
Unfortunately there is no real ticker material for the industry.
Escrap more generally follows automotive and appliance recycling. So if you know car A scraps at $1000 today and is $900 tomorrow you can expect boards across most classes to drop 10% as well. Same with that $50 freezer. If it’s $55 tomorrow expect boards to follow up around 10% as well.
The pink elephant though is the current plastics industry.
If some major company opened up tomorrow and recycled every plastic man has made and did so without charge, all mixed electronics/plastics scrap would skyrocket overnight as the plastics burden is suddenly removed.

CPUs have a base rate, and a pm rate. The base rate has been stable for years but jumped recently (last 3 or 4 years on a slow rise) over supply chain worries, as most of the not so rare rare earths are found at the continental crash zone between Europe and Asia.
That aside the bulk of cpu value is in PM content. The combination, especially in ceramics, is what makes IC and CPU/ICont chips so valuable.
If you want to know where the market Is headed; I cannot help. I’ve no idea. I would expect ceramic IC classes to fluctuate wildly and semi randomly in the coming months though. Rumours of 40XX CPUs flipping for $150 per pound when in large quantity are in the field already. But if we suddenly sloppy kiss Russia and make up and have unlimited totally free trade prices will fall through the floor to the centre of the earth. Great for consumers ($500 i9 anyone?) but terrible for those who scrap as a living. That’s unlikely though and as fear of a shortage we currently suffer in rare earths becomes more a reality of being cut off price, and hence scrap price, is definitely going to rise.

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