Hi, I am looking to track iron ores futures price. I currently look at the futures quotes here : http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/ferrous/iron-ore-62pct-fe-cfr-china-tsi-swap-futures.html To my understanding the futures should start trading at 6:00pm CT. However I see no volume or trades. Can you please explain me what is happening? I am looking to track the iron ores front month price. Should I look at other websites? Thank you for your help.
I'm guessing there is really no trading on these in the traditional sense where two anonymous parties meet on the exchange to transact, it's probably more brokered prearranged OTC style that just trades in CME for the standard contract and clearing. I know a lot of the less traded commodities and even some of the more exotic regular commodities like daily oil options are like that.
My understanding there is no intraday data on many of the iron ore futures and the last price is usually updated at end of day. Very difficult to get reliable iron prices during the day, you will only get one price end of day. (From my experience)
There is only one major iron ore futures market in the world, which is in Dalian Commodity Exchange in China. The website is http://www.dce.com.cn/DCE/Products/Industrial/Iron Ore/index.html . It is priced as CNY/ton.
Yes, with respect to the traded volume. For example, 2.55 million DCE iron ore futures contracts (255 million tons) were traded today.
From what I can tell, iron ore is primarily an OTC traded product. I wouldn't trust that the time and sales you see from a very illiquid futures product in any way reflects the actual valuation of the cash market in any meaningful way. This is pretty common with "new" or illiquid futures. In fact, it is quite common (even procedural) for futures exchanges to mark a settlement to illiquid contracts based upon the cash or OTC analog.