Now, being 12:44 mountain dst on 28 Ap 2020, is a great time to move very low (below peripheral) and very high (cell, har drive, 8086 cpus) value items.
Nickel, tin, and copper, all drive the board market.
Silver, nickel, tin, and gold drive the cpu market. Nickel is at one of the highest points in the last quarter century. Tin is massively up do to people buying canned foods but not actually using and recycling the cans.
Gold, as always, does what the F it wants to.
I’ve very recently covered gold and silver extensively.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=19097With 30+ years I say the same as I usually do! Hoarding is useless. Anyone who’s used boardsort for over a year knows the prices jump with no explanation. Up, down. wtf?!!!
Those of us more on the inside of the industry, who pay for charts and guides and non-consumer info... escrap is the second hardest industry to predict. Following plastic.
I can tell you with fair certainty where a SPECIFIC metal will go over the next 14 days. As can Chris, probably quite a few users here. If that were all there was too it life would be simpler. I can not place eScrap in general.
If you want my honest, personal, opinion? Boards over all will drop as recycling and distribution opens up again. I think boards have Topped out.
CPUs, and specialities like cell phone boards, will continue to climb for a number of months. It’s going to be another 4-6 months before major shipments of sorted materials begin to move regularly again. At that point I suspect 8080:8086 CPUs (and the related included rectangular gold cap DIP processors) will drop to the $95-$105 range before eventually climbing back to more reasonable $110-$115 rates.
Expect 486 to drop to the $85-$95 range.
I did this a few times; where will the markets go, over the years.
I’ve been mostly correct.
Answer: Sell what’s under gold cap board rate now while you can. Hold CPUs till June or maybe July before you dump them. Boards are already dropping. Copper has been stable. Silver has barely moved. Lead is falling.
Plastics are falling in value and that’s a nic chunk of board recycling material. Rescue wood topped out in March and has been falling to the pre 2020 rates since. Paper is back to the original 11/2019 rates that have been within 10c per lb for years up till then.
This is as high as most things will go right now: end of the world aside. It would take something really major and catastrophic to change these things.