Co-owners,

This is our 25th edition. We publish 50 a year, so we are already half a year into this journey through the index, one company at a time. At that pace, with ~4,200 companies to get through, we will be finished in roughly 84 years. We are pacing ourselves.

Twenty-five weeks, twenty-five businesses we co-own and had mostly never thought about. Here is number twenty-five.

Somewhere in America, a scrapped car is being shredded, melted in an electric furnace and poured back out as fresh steel, ready to become a bridge, a warehouse or another car. The company doing more of that than almost anyone else was built from nothing in the 1990s, and it has been sitting in your index fund the whole time.

This week we drew Steel Dynamics.

Before we dive in, a reminder of what the index itself has delivered over time.

Every week, we pull one company at random from the FTSE All-World with ~4,200 companies representing 90% of global stock market wealth. We share the index's long-term returns since inception in 1986 as a reminder of why we're here: the long game. New to the newsletter? Start here.

Founded in 1993 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. First mill began production in 1996. Listed on the Nasdaq (STLD). Headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

A few key facts:

In the late 1980s, the American steel industry was being humbled. The old giants smelted iron ore in colossal blast furnaces, the way steel had been made for a century, and they were slow, expensive and losing ground. A challenger called Nucor took a bet on a new German technology: instead of melting ore, melt scrap in an electric furnace, then cast it into a thin ribbon of steel that could be rolled into sheet with a fraction of the machinery. Nucor put a manager named Keith Busse in charge of building the world's first mill of its kind, at Crawfordsville, Indiana. Plenty of people expected it to fail. It worked.

Busse had built it with two colleagues, Mark Millett and Richard Teets. Over a beer at a Holiday Inn, he suggested the three of them go and start their own steel company, and do it even better. By his own account, they looked at him as though he had lost his mind. They did it anyway. In 1993 they founded Steel Dynamics, and because they had just built the template, they knew exactly what worked. Their first mill, at Butler, Indiana, went up faster and cheaper than anything comparable in the industry, and investors backed them almost entirely on Busse's track record. Thirty years later the three-man start-up is one of the largest steelmakers in the country.

Steel Dynamics does three things, and they feed one another.

Steelmaking is the heart of it, about 72% of sales. Six electric-arc-furnace mills melt scrap and roll it into two broad families of product. Flat-rolled steel is the smooth sheet that becomes car bodies, appliances, roofing and the walls of warehouses. Long products are the structural bones: beams, railway rail, reinforcing bar and specialty shapes. If you have ever been inside the Las Vegas Sphere, you have stood under their handiwork, because the deck in its inner dome came from the company's fabrication arm.

That fabrication arm is the second business. Under the name New Millennium, it turns the company's own steel into the joists, girders and decking that hold up shops, warehouses and offices. It is a neat piece of design, because it creates a ready customer for the mills upstairs.

The third business is recycling. Through a subsidiary called OmniSource, Steel Dynamics is one of the largest metals recyclers in North America, gathering and processing scrap across the continent. Most of that scrap goes straight into its own furnaces. In 2025 it put roughly 14 million tons of ferrous scrap and 900 million pounds of non-ferrous scrap back into circulation.

Here is the part worth pausing on. Around 87% of the metal in a Steel Dynamics beam or coil is recycled. The old blast-furnace method starts with mined ore and coal. Steel Dynamics starts with the things we throw away. A washing machine, a demolished bridge, a scrapped lorry, melted down and reborn as new steel, using roughly a third of the greenhouse emissions and a quarter of the energy of the traditional route.

Regular readers will remember Copart, the salvaged-car auctioneer from a few editions ago. Follow one of those written-off cars far enough down the chain and it is shredded into scrap, and a good share of American scrap ends up in furnaces like these. The car you crashed can become the beam over your head. It sounds like a marketing line, but it is how the business actually runs.

The newest chapter is aluminium. Steel Dynamics is spending ​​~2.5bn on a recycled-aluminium mill in Columbus, Mississippi, plus ~$400m on satellite centres to feed it, applying the same recycled-furnace playbook to a different metal. The target markets are drink cans, car bodies and industrial sheet. It shipped its first coils in mid-2025 and is still losing money as the plant ramps up, which is normal for a project this size, but the losses are shrinking each quarter and management expects it to add $650m to $700m a year to profits once it hits full stride.

A co-owner should hold a few things in mind. Steel is cyclical, and earnings swing with it. The company made ~$1.2bn in 2025, well down from the boom of 2021 and 2022, when prices spiked and annual profits topped $3.8bn. The aluminium build is a large bet that is still loss-making today. And this is a commodity business in the end, so costs, discipline and the spread between scrap and steel prices decide who wins. Steel Dynamics has come out ahead for three decades by being the low-cost, nimble operator, but nothing about the metal itself is glamorous.

The through-line is patient execution. The shares first listed in 1996 at around $4. As of writing they trade near $220, and the company is worth roughly $32bn. It has raised its dividend for 14 years running and bought back more than 40% of its shares since 2017. 

In January 2027, the founder, Mark Millett, steps up to executive chairman and hands the chief executive job to Theresa Wagler, the long-serving finance chief who has been with the company for 28 years, one of the few women to lead a major American steelmaker.

None of this shows up when you glance at your index fund. You see a single line. But somewhere inside it is a share of the mills in Indiana and Texas turning the country's scrap back into the steel that holds up everything around you. Through your fund, a sliver of that is yours.

Data and images sourced from the Steel Dynamics Annual Report 2025 and the Steel Dynamics Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call Presentation. Leadership succession per the company's announcement of 4 August 2026. Share price and market cap as of writing.

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Next week we cross the Atlantic to Europe.