Building one, two, three freeways to the future

摘要

While steel derivatives have been available on the over-the-counter (OTC) market for nearly four years-Koch Metals Trading Ltd. started offering OTC price risk products in January 2004 and Multi Commodity Exchange of India Ltd. (MCX) launched a steel contract two months later-none of the world's big commodities exchanges appeared ready to jump on the steel futures bandwagon until 2006. Over a little more than a year, three major global exchanges announced detailed proposals for contracts, each designed to serve a different section of the steel supply chain and each using a different structure. In July 2007, Nymex announced plans to launch by the end of the year a regional, cash-settled contract for U.S. hot-rolled coil based on SteelBenchmarker, a pricing index provided by World Steel Dynamics Inc. created in cooperation with AMM and sister publication Metal Bulletin. Nymex said its contract, which is likely to be for 20-short-ton lots forward for 18 consecutive months, is going to be listed on its Clearport trading and clearing platform. SteelBenchmarker, which is an index compiled by surveying the opinions held by a cross-section of the steel industry regarding the price of U.S. hot-rolled coil (as well as around 20 other product and regional price indices), will be used to settle the contract on a daily basis, said Robert A. Levin, Nymex senior vice president of research.