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Iron ore pricing

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Iron ore pricing

Guys thanks for you information it helps to make sense of a complex market My question is around how you quote the price and movement of Iron Ore each day it has always irked me a little as I feel accuracy matters but your reporting does not seem to add up to me - this week Monday to Friday you reported the following iron ore prices and movements 105 +0.75%, 105.98 +0.8%, 106.2 +0.4%, 106.2 Flat (is this 0.0%?), 102.6 -0.7% from a maths perspective none of this works - if you go by price the changes are from Tuesday 0.93%, 0.2%, 0.3% and 3.7% if you go by the movement shown even taking in some rounding error you end up with crazy numbers - so my question is what is correct and why is there no consistency - thanks very much

Answer

Hi Kurt,

Fair comment. The note picks up data from Bloomberg and we use the active futures contract as the one we quote (SCOA) in the image below. This week, the active contract went from December (SCOZ5) to January (SCOF6), hence the decline of only 0.7% but the price drop from $106.20 to $102.60 on that day. The best way to report movements is really though the Chinese price (IOEA) but we’re all used to the $US price .

We’ll have a look at this Monday and will try and make a note of when the active contract changes. See below the forward looking futures contracts in Iron Ore.

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Iron Ore Futures – Source Bloomberg
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