Fastmarkets moves from 2018 to 2019
By IM Staff
Published: Thursday, 03 January 2019
Fastmarkets worked to empower its customers in 2018 - a year when they had to navigate metal markets in which fundamentals were often tightening even as greater political restraints were placed on trade than for many years.
Here’s a quick review of the key developments,
which also indicate our direction for 2019:
- We consulted in detail with the industry to meet its
requirements for greater transparency in volatile markets,
enabling us to launch more than 20 new price series
- We put 13 of our benchmark prices through an
independent IOSCO assurance process to give those that
use them even greater confidence in their representativeness,
independence and robustness
- We refined the specifications of scores of our prices,
increasing the frequency at which we indexed or assessed many
of them, enabling us to provide more continual coverage of
key markets
- We hired and trained more staff to enhance our price
reporting and market coverage. We now have a pricing,
editorial and research team that numbers more than 100 people
worldwide to cover the metals and minerals markets
- We rebranded our business to clarify what we do as a
global team and provide a clearer experience for our
customers in every part of the world
- We worked closely with futures exchanges to list
contracts against our benchmark prices to give more
participants in the physical industry the capacity to hedge
their price risk
-
We produced market reports that captured key developments
in markets. To take a few examples from December
alone:
- We trimmed and rationalized to reduce the amount of
non-core information that we published to focus on the
markets and services that really matter
- (In the context of rationalization, at the start of 2019
we plan to stop publishing the daily morning briefs and
week-in-brief reports. These services were introduced some
years ago to aggregate coverage for our subscribers but we
think we will provide more value by investing that time
instead in pricing and covering turbid markets)
- Over the next year, our editors, analysts and reporters
will continue with this strategy of working closely with the
metals industry to launch, develop and refine the benchmarks
and coverage that the market needs to price, market and
purchase material.
But we are also on a technological journey, an early milestone
of which is the Excel Add-in, which will enable you to
integrate our prices into your Excel spreadsheets seamlessly.
Much more of this will be seen in 2019 while we develop our
customer platforms.
Fastmarkets exists to enable you to steer surely through
whatever the markets bring over the next 12 months.
If you have any suggestions, comments or advice to help us in
our objective, do not hesitate to contact me.
Alex Harrison
Editorial & pricing director
aharrison@fastmarkets.com