1st Edition

The Price Reporters A Guide to PRAs and Commodity Benchmarks

By Owain Johnson Copyright 2018
    198 Pages
    by Routledge

    198 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Table of Contents

    Acknowledgements

    Chapter 1: PRAs and the commodity markets they serve

    Chapter 2: The PRA business model

    Chapter 3: How price benchmarks work

    Chapter 4: Who are the price reporters?

    Chapter 5: A brief history of energy PRAs

    Chapter 6: PRAs in the metals and minerals markets

    Chapter 7: PRAs in the agricultural markets

    Chapter 8: Petrochemical and Plastics PRAs

    Chapter 9: PRAs in Asia

    Chapter 10: PRAs and environmental issues

    Chapter 11: PRA pricing methodologies

    Chapter 12: The Market-on-Close

    Chapter 13: The PRAs and the exchanges

    Chapter 14: PRAs and global regulation

    Chapter 15: PRAs and European regulation

    Chapter 16: Academic research into PRAs

    Chapter 17: Conclusion – the future of PRAs

    Chapter 18: Further reading and bibliography

    References

    Index

    Biography

    Owain Johnson is Managing Director for Energy Research & Product Development at CME Group. He previously served as Managing Director of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange. He has worked for a number of pricing and media companies and has a degree from Cambridge University, UK.

    "Owain Johnson has written an important book, offering the first practitioner’s guide to the world of PRAs and commodity price formation."

    -Tilak K. Doshi, Managing Consultant, Muse, Stancil & Co.