Older Than Most Exchanges on This List
Founded in 1913 as Metal Bulletin, later rebranded Fastmarkets, this outlasts and predates several of the actual exchanges covered here. It began as a print bulletin literally reporting metal prices to a pre-internet trading community.
A Price Nobody Trades, Everybody Uses
Fastmarkets doesn't run a market — it surveys real transactions and firm bids and offers from producers, traders and consumers, then publishes an assessed benchmark price. Supply contracts across the industry are literally written as "Fastmarkets index plus premium or discount" rather than referencing a futures settlement.
The Reference Price for Metals With No Real Exchange
Lithium, cobalt, molybdenum and rhodium are each produced or traded in volumes, or structured in long-term contracts, too thin or too irregular for a listed futures contract to work well. A surveyed benchmark fills that gap where an exchange never formed.
Built Its Reputation on Batteries
Fastmarkets' lithium and cobalt assessments became the reference point for electric-vehicle battery supply contracts as EV demand surged through the 2020s — a market that barely needed a serious benchmark twenty years ago now runs on one.
Because there's no single central order book, two different price-reporting agencies can publish slightly different numbers for the same metal on the same day — the "right" price is really whichever one your contract happens to reference.
