44S&P Global Platts Price Assessments
Growing market importance: From price reference to price “benchmark” status
S&P Global Platts publishes thousands of daily price assessments and is a key source of pricing intelligence. As the world’s diverse energy and commodity markets continue to evolve, S&P Global Platts’ innovations in price assessment and information delivery have provided solutions to pricing challenges and helped build S&P Global Platts’ reputation as a leading provider of energy and commodities price information. For a given commodity, market participants generally utilize one or two benchmarks, with futures settled against one. It is market participants who choose which price assessments to adopt as benchmarks. S&P Global Platts is independent and does not participate in trading the markets it assesses.
How Market Participants Use Price Assessments
| S&P Global Platts price assessments are the basis for billions of dollars of transactions annually in the physical and futures markets |
| Buyers, sellers, and traders use price assessments as a basis for pricing spot transactions and term contracts |
| Risk managers use them to settle contracts and to place a market value on the product(s) they hold |
| Analysts use them to identify trends and patterns in supply and demand |
| Governments reference them to formulate royalty payments and retail prices |
| Exchanges and investors use them to price derivatives contracts |
S&P Global Platts’ benchmark price assessments are the basis for nearly 1,300 exchange-traded, cash-settled futures contracts
Data as of 12/31/2021