ABSTRACT

Every consumer in a modern economy is indirectly exposed to the work of a price reporting agency (PRA) each time they fill up their car, take a flight or switch on a light, and yet the general public is completely unaware of the existence of PRAs. Firms like Platts, Argus and ICIS, which are referenced every day by commodity traders and which influence billions of dollars of trade, are totally unfamiliar to consumers.

The Price Reporters: A Guide to PRAs and Commodity Benchmarks brings the mysterious world of price reporting out of the shadows for the first time, providing a comprehensive guide to the agencies that set the world’s commodity prices. This book explains the importance of PRAs to the global commodities industry, highlighting why PRAs affect every consumer around the world. It introduces the individual PRAs, their history and the current state of play in the industry, and also presents the challenges that the PRA industry is facing now and in the future, in particular how regulation might impact on the PRAs, their relationships with commodity exchanges, and their likely direction.

This is the first-ever guide to PRAs and is destined to become the standard reference work for anyone with an interest in commodity prices and the firms that set them.

chapter 1|14 pages

PRAs and the commodity markets they serve

chapter 2|11 pages

The PRA business model

chapter 3|9 pages

How price benchmarks work

chapter 4|7 pages

Who are the price reporters?

chapter 5|11 pages

A brief history of energy PRAs

chapter 6|9 pages

PRAs in the metals and minerals markets

chapter 7|13 pages

PRAs in the agricultural markets

chapter 8|8 pages

Petrochemical and plastics PRAs

chapter 9|12 pages

PRAs in Asia

chapter 10|9 pages

PRAs and environmental issues

chapter 11|18 pages

PRA pricing methodologies

chapter 12|8 pages

The market-on-close

chapter 13|10 pages

The PRAs and the exchanges

chapter 14|15 pages

PRAs and global regulation

chapter 15|8 pages

PRAs and European regulation

chapter 16|5 pages

Academic research into PRAs

chapter 17|7 pages

Conclusion

The future of PRAs

chapter 18|3 pages

Further reading