Trygve Munthe
Analyst · Evercore. Please ask your question
Sure. I think this start with the firming of the market in September. It was clearly increased demand from the refiners and the deliveries of newbuildings were sort of slowing down. So you had the very basic fundamentals, both working in our favor. And you saw rates coming up to, call it about $40,000 a day. And then we had COSCO sanctions hitting the market, and that certainly put everything on fire. And part of the reason why it got so crazy, in our opinion, is how the Chinese and [indiscernible] amongst them, how they reacted. They immediately abandoned the COSCO fixtures and were scrambling to get the replacement ships to do the work. And in that week, that is now two weeks ago, it was very unusual circumstances, and the charter is really panicked. And then the biggest numbers were done on that Friday. And then over the weekend, it seems like people sort of got the pulse down in the normal range again. And things calmed down, the activity was lower, and then you started seeing ships failing and then the replacements and so forth. And since then, I think the charters have been doing their typical tactic, that they want to [indiscernible] the cargoes into the market to try to make the owning fraternity nervous. But so far as we said in our opening remarks, we are at levels now that are still pretty darn good. We're just under $100,000 a day, and that's fantastic rates and the fixtures or the indexes suggesting $200,000 to $300,000, it turned out that wasn't really doable. And when you get to those kind of freight levels, you are making it very hard for the refiners to make money. And in that crazy week, we happened to be in Korea. We met a lot of refiners, saying that at these freight levels, it just doesn't make sense for us. We will pull back the throughputs and start trading our time charter ships rather.