Benchmark launches new daily prices for lithium and cobalt

Benchmark is pleased to announce it has launched daily prices for several grades of critical battery raw materials as part of its market leading Lithium and Cobalt Price Assessments.

The new price grades, which launched on 31 July are:

Notably, these new grades do not replace but rather sit alongside and complement the existing weekly price assessments. Benchmark’s unique daily methodology disregards bids, offers, indications, tenders, contract prices, clearing prices, model values, broker marks, or sentiment and only considers verified spot trades.

During prolonged periods of low spot liquidity, defined by BMI as exceeding 10 consecutive working days, our Extended Illiquidity Protocol ensures prices move in line with the market trend whilst remaining insulated from extreme sentiment-driven swings. This unique methodology, designed in consultation with major miners, automakers, banks and brokers, avoids the exaggerated volatility seen in many of the existing daily price assessments published by legacy media outlets.

The daily assessment window closes every weekday at 4pm (London) and BMI will publish the price assessment every weekday on its website by 5pm (London). Price inputs received after 4pm (London) will form part of the following working day’s price assessment.

Daisy Jennings-Gray, Head of Prices at Benchmark said: “Gradually mounting liquidity and recent elevated price volatility in the lithium and cobalt markets demonstrate why this is the perfect time to launch more frequent price assessments, enabling key decisions in the battery supply chain to be made using the most accurate data. ”

Adam Megginson, Senior Price Analyst at Benchmark said: “Leveraging Benchmark’s trustworthy price data, subscribers can now more effectively unpick short term policy or sentiment-driven price rallies from consistent pricing inflection points, underpinned by supply and demand fundamentals.”

Benchmark publishes daily, weekly and monthly price assessments, to the highest IOSCO standards for:

To speak to our team to learn more about this service and to see a sample price report, please provide your details below