Inside Open Trading: Live Price Discovery for LithiumInside Open Trading: Live Price Discovery for Lithium

Metalshub Open Trading goes live in November, starting with lithium. Open Trading is a new trading mode where firm bids and offers sit on one screen, visible to every vetted participant and anonymous until the deal. A trade can only be concluded between companies that have approved each other as counterparties, and specification and origin are always shown. Open Trading sits beside private tenders, bidding events and auctions on Metalshub, so each company can choose how to trade per product and per deal on one platform.

Lithium has moved a long way up the market maturity curve. Fifteen years ago, it was a small specialty chemical sold under confidential contracts. Today, it is first and foremost a battery raw material, with futures contracts, daily price assessments and a growing spot market. Price discovery for physical lithium still depends mostly on bilateral negotiation and published price assessments, and buyers and sellers have had no neutral, shared place to show their live demand and supply.

In this MetalshubTalks webinar, we walk through Open Trading in its first weeks of trading, with lithium as the worked example, and look at what it takes for a raw material market to trade openly.

The discussion explores:

• Where lithium sits on the market maturity curve, and why its most standard grades are ready for live trading
• The launch products: battery-grade lithium carbonate, technical-grade lithium carbonate and spodumene concentrate
• How Open Trading works: firm bids and offers, anonymity until the deal, and two-way counterparty approval
• A walkthrough of Open Trading on the platform, from posting a bid or offer to concluding a trade
• How to choose between a private tender, a bidding event, an auction and Open Trading for each product and each deal
• What lithium producers, consumers and traders asked for when the terms were developed, and how those terms will be reviewed with the market
• Why a company with its volume under long-term contracts still gains from watching the live market

MetalshubTalks host Samir Jaber is joined by Dr Frank Jackel, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Metalshub, for a conversation that combines market context, a look inside the platform, and a view on how other raw materials can follow as their markets mature.

Join the conversation to see how live price discovery works in lithium, and what it means for how you buy and sell.

This session is designed for heads of sales and commercial teams, procurement leaders, traders, pricing managers and market analysts active in lithium and battery raw materials.