Nucor

Nucor just posted its second straight record quarter for steel shipments. Revenue hit 10.4 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2026, up 23 percent from a year earlier, and profit per share nearly doubled to 5.04 dollars from 2.60 dollars. The bigger story is margins: gross margin bottomed at 11.3 percent in late 2025 and has climbed four straight quarters to 19.6 percent.

Steel imports into the US fell about 25 percent year over year as trade rules tightened, pushing more orders to domestic mills like Nucor. At the same time the company is bringing on major new capacity, including a sheet mill in West Virginia and a towers and structures plant in Utah, both ramping through 2027. The demand is coming from data centers, power grids and factories, some of the fastest growing construction markets today.

Steel is a commodity business and profits swing hard with the economy. You can see it in Nucor's own numbers: profit per share fell to 1.64 dollars in late 2025 before recovering to 5.04 dollars a year and a half later. A construction slowdown or a drop in steel prices would hit earnings fast, and the stock tends to move almost twice as much as the overall market.

A big part of this profit boom rests on trade rules that limit foreign steel, and those rules can change with a new administration or a court ruling. The stock has also run up hard and now trades at a clear premium to its own typical valuation over the past year. On top of that, the new mills carry start-up costs in the back half of 2026 that eat into profits before they add to them.