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.
Contracts & Products Traded
Fastmarkets doesn't list contracts at all — there's no order book, no lot size, no expiry date. What it sells is a published number: daily and weekly price assessments built from actual transaction data and firm bids and offers gathered directly from producers, traders and consumers across lithium, cobalt, molybdenum, rhodium and dozens of other metals and materials, plus the market commentary and forecasts that go with them. Those assessments get written directly into physical supply contracts as pricing formulas — "Fastmarkets index plus premium" — standing in for the futures contract that would exist if these metals traded in high enough volume for an exchange to work.
Role in Global Price Discovery
Fastmarkets indices are the actual settlement mechanism for metals too thinly or irregularly traded to support a listed futures contract — battery makers, miners and traders write supply deals directly against its lithium and cobalt numbers rather than any exchange settlement price. That's a genuinely different role from LME or COMEX: Fastmarkets aggregates real-world deals into a benchmark after the fact, instead of matching live bids and offers in real time. In the site's 24-hour relay it doesn't occupy a trading-hours slot the way the exchanges do — it publishes on its own European-business-hours schedule, filling in the metals none of the other ten markets here actually cover.
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.
Sources
- Fastmarkets founded 1913 as Metal Bulletin — Metal Bulletin Centenary: The Birth of Metal Bulletin (2024)
