SteelBenchmarker steel price index (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

SteelBenchmarker’s full historical series is a paid product (World Steel Dynamics / American Metal Market), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session. The latest spot prices are posted free, but the product-level history used for research is a subscription. Treat it as unverified until someone exercises the full series. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

SteelBenchmarker publishes biweekly reference transaction prices for U.S. and world steel products: hot-rolled band (coil), cold-rolled coil, hot-dipped galvanized, standard plate, and steel scrap grades. Prices are built from a survey of buyers and sellers and serve as the public benchmark that physical steel contracts and the NYMEX steel futures settle against. A paper we distill uses it: Martin uses SteelBenchmarker product-level biweekly prices (January 2007 to December 2017, 19,653 product-publication-date observations across six products) as the primary source for measuring price dispersion and price levels when testing whether the introduction of steel futures reduced dispersion in the physical product market.

• Cost: the latest spot reference prices are posted free on the SteelBenchmarker site; the full historical, product-level series is a paid subscription. No open bulk download of the history.
• Vendor: World Steel Dynamics with American Metal Market (the citing paper calls it a proprietary price database).
• Coverage: biweekly, by product and region (USA, China, World Export), going back to 2006; the cross-product structure is what enables dispersion-across-products tests.

Access (when licensed)

• Spot prices free; history licensed. The current biweekly release is public; the multi-year, product-level back series used for panel work comes through a SteelBenchmarker / American Metal Market subscription.
• The grain is product by publication date. Each release carries one price per product per region; the panel is assembled by stacking releases, as the citing paper does around the futures-introduction events.
• Credentials are required for the historical series. Keep any credentials in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• Biweekly, not daily. Prices update roughly every two weeks, so event windows are measured in publication dates, not trading days; the citing paper counts 40 publication dates before and after each event. Do not assume a daily series exists.
• Survey-based reference prices, not transaction tape. Each print is a reference level derived from a buyer-and-seller survey, not a clearing price from a tape. It is a benchmark, with the smoothing and judgment that implies; dispersion measures must be built across reporting firms or products, not within a single tick.
• Free spot page is not the research series. The public site shows only the latest values; scraping it does not reconstruct the licensed history, and the free numbers can be revised relative to the archived series. Use the licensed back series for any panel.
• Product definitions and regional baskets matter. Hot-rolled band, cold-rolled coil, and the scrap grades are distinct series with different liquidity and different futures linkage; treating them as one steel price conflates the treated and control products the design relies on.
• Units and currency. Prices are quoted per ton in USD for U.S. products; reconcile metric versus short ton and region before comparing across baskets.

Citation

Cite the source and product, e.g.: SteelBenchmarker (World Steel Dynamics / American Metal Market), [dates], accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the products and regions used, the date range, and whether the free spot page or the licensed historical series was the source.