This Time it is Different

9 Oct 2015: The VlCC market is hot again, but for different reasons. Late last week, time charter equivalents (TCE’s), a measure of vessel’s daily earnings exceeded the magical $100,000 per day mark for VLCC’s.  This brings back memories from the 2004 –2008 “super-cycle”, when this happened on a regular basis.  In anticipation of these good times, a large publicly traded shipowner opened their presentation at the annual Marine Money Seminar in New York in June 2003 with a slide that defined a VLCC as a “Very Large Cash Creator”.  The last time that VLCC’s reached $100,000 per day on the AG – East route (TD3 according to the Baltic Exchange) was on July 30, 2008, a little more than 7 years ago.  So, is it in the words of Yankees legend Yogi Berra, “like déjà vu all over again”?  Let’s take a look at the circumstances and context that surround the current rate spike and compare them to the situation in 2008. Download here