At Price Extremes
Which markets are sitting at the top or the bottom of their own twenty-year range, and why. Every price here is adjusted for inflation, the list is computed rather than chosen, and it re-ranks itself as prices move.
A commodity price is a number without a scale. Fishmeal at $2,630 a tonne means nothing to anyone who does not trade fishmeal. What carries information is where that number sits against its own history, which is why the trade talks in ranges and multi-year highs rather than in levels.
This page computes that position for every market on the site with a long public price series. For each one it takes the last twenty years, finds the highest and lowest print, and asks where today sits between them. Anything within 10 percent of either end counts as an extreme, and is described by the end it is nearest: 3 percent above its twenty-year low, or 9 percent below its twenty-year high.
Every price here is in today’s money
One note on method, and then it does not come up again. Every price on this page is deflated by US consumer prices and expressed in today’s dollars. That is not a refinement. A price series in dollars drifts upward with the value of the dollar, so a market that has merely kept pace with inflation for twenty years prints its highest ever number today, and again next year, without anything having happened to it. Ranked on unadjusted prices this page would have called six markets record-breakers that are nothing of the sort, and missed most of the markets in real trouble.
Container freight is the clearest illustration on the site. Left unadjusted it is sitting on the highest print in twenty years. Adjusted, it is 4% above its 20-year low, which is unremarkable. Same series, same day.
At a twenty-year high
2 markets out of the 41 with a long public price series. Both of the usual explanations apply: supply that cannot answer quickly, and demand that arrived faster than anyone planned for.
52,882 $/metric ton today, against a 20-year range of 16,170 to 53,076, so it is at its 20-year high.
The smallest of the major base metals and the most easily disrupted. Myanmar’s Man Maw mine has been restarting only slowly under controlled permits, Indonesian refined exports fell more than 40 percent year on year amid export-licence delays and a crackdown on illegal mining, and demand from electronics and the grid build-out keeps arriving. Worth one caveat the rally does not advertise: visible exchange inventories have more than doubled in three months, so the tightness is a story about future supply rather than an observed physical shortage.
13,543 $/metric ton today, against a 20-year range of 4,888 to 14,820, so it is 9% below its 20-year high.
The metal every electrification forecast runs through, against a decade of thin discovery and mines that take the better part of a decade to permit and build. Grid investment, data centres and vehicles all pull on the same wire, and the supply side has had no comparable decade.
At a twenty-year low
These are the markets in genuine distress, and most of them would be invisible without the inflation adjustment. A price that has been flat in dollars for two decades has fallen by more than a third in what it buys, which is why a grower can be selling at the same number their parents did and going out of business doing it.
273.1 c/kg today, against a 20-year range of 273.1 to 577.3, so it is at its 20-year low.
Auction-priced, with no futures market anywhere, so there is no forward curve to absorb a surplus and nothing to hedge into. Production has outrun demand, led by Indian crops, and in some recent Mombasa sales more than half the lots offered went unsold. A market where the seller cannot lay off risk takes the whole adjustment in the spot price.
121.9 $/metric ton today, against a 20-year range of 114.9 to 377.3, so it is 6% above its 20-year low.
The fourth cereal, and the one that moves on other people’s news. Most of the crop is fed rather than malted, so it trades as a follower of the wider feed complex, which has given back nearly everything it gained in 2022. Thin futures at Euronext and on the ASX mean much of the hedging is done in wheat.
6.54 $/kilogram today, against a 20-year range of 6.07 to 15.1, so it is 8% above its 20-year low.
The clearest aquaculture supply story on the site. Ecuador went from roughly 40,000 tonnes of exports in 2000 to about 1.2 million tonnes in 2023, and a farmed animal on that trajectory sets its own price. Disease remains the only thing that reliably interrupts it.
The indexes, kept separate
Roughly half the markets here are covered by a producer price index or an import price index rather than by a dollar price. An index is a direction, not a level, and comparing one against a real price would be a category error, so they are ranked on their own. The inflation adjustment matters more here than anywhere, because an unadjusted index is close to guaranteed to sit near its own high.
95.8 US import price index today, against a 20-year range of 95.4 to 167.9, so it is at its 20-year low.
The lab-grown crash, still working through. Note the caveat that applies to this series specifically: it is a US import price index rather than a dollar-per-carat price, so it measures what America paid rather than what a stone is worth.
170.4 US PPI index today, against a 20-year range of 167.8 to 280.8, so it is 2% above its 20-year low.
Downstream of a milk pool that keeps growing, and priced off class formulas rather than an open market, so a surplus shows up as a lower published price rather than as unsold product.
206.3 US PPI index today, against a 20-year range of 204.3 to 255.8, so it is 1% above its 20-year low.
Structural rather than cyclical: consumption per head has been falling across the traditional producing countries for a generation, and the vines planted for the old level of demand are still in the ground.
223.6 US PPI index today, against a 20-year range of 203.4 to 395.8, so it is 10% above its 20-year low.
A broad basket rather than one crop, which is why it moves slowly and why a reading this low is unusual. Treat it as a direction rather than a price.
168.4 US PPI index today, against a 20-year range of 161.6 to 189.3, so it is 4% above its 20-year low.
Against the whole record
A twenty-year window is a choice, so here is the harder version: which markets are near the highest price they have ever printed. The answer shrinks sharply.
One caution the table carries in its own column. “All-time” means since the series began, and these series do not begin together: most of the commodity prices start in 1992, while lamb and cattle start in 2010. A record since 2010 is a much weaker claim than a record since 1992, and the start year is printed so the two are never confused.
| Market | Against its record | Record runs from |
|---|---|---|
| Tin | at its all-time high | 1992 |
| Copper | 9% below its all-time high | 1992 |
| Live Cattle | 13% below its all-time high | 2010 |
What is moving now
A market can sit in the middle of its range and still be the most interesting thing on the board, because it got there quickly. This table measures how much of its own historical range each market has covered in the past six months, which judges a move by the standards of that market: ten dollars is nothing to copper and a catastrophe to pulpwood.
A market qualifies by covering at least 15 percent of its own range in six months, which is already a violent move; nothing on this site has ever covered half its range that fast, so a fifty percent screen returns nothing. That qualifying measure is not shown, because a share of range and a price change have different denominators and invite comparison they cannot survive. The column shows the price change, which is the number a reader can act on.
| Market | Price change, 6m | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Cocoa | +72% | A West African supply story that has not resolved. Ageing trees, disease and weather in Cote d Ivoire and Ghana against stocks that were already thin. |
| ULSD Diesel | +43% | Refining margins, not crude. Products have run far ahead of the barrel they are made from since the Strait of Hormuz crisis interrupted Gulf flows. |
| Fishmeal & Fish Oil | +31% | Peru sets the world price by decree, cancelling or allowing an anchoveta season outright rather than merely catching less, so this market moves in steps rather than drifts. |
| Salmon | -24% | Falling, and for the reason salmon usually falls: it is farmed to a harvest date, so supply arrives on a schedule set two years ago regardless of what demand has done since. |
Read the table for clusters rather than for individual names. When several related markets appear together, the cause is usually one thing rather than several: a run of refined products moving far more than the crude they are made from is not four stories about diesel, gasoline and jet, it is one story about refining margins, and the place to follow it is Oil 101 on the Strait of Hormuz. A lone name moving on its own is more often a supply accident in that one market.
The tree, the pulp and the box
The market that prompted this page shows what the range measure is for. In the American South, pine pulpwood, the small trees unfit for lumber but fine for cardboard, has collapsed. Growers paid about $16 a ton a few years ago were offered an average of under $6 a ton by late 2025, and in the worst counties are paying contractors to haul thinnings away. Meanwhile the paper industry looks healthy, and on a long unadjusted chart pulp and paper appears to be near an all-time high.
Both things are true, because they are not the same product. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a separate index for each stage of the chain, and reading them together is the whole answer.
One chain, three prices
BLS producer price indexes, in today’s money.
The tree
Logs, bolts, timber, pulpwood and wood chips
1% above its 20-year low
The pulp
Wood pulp
20% above its 20-year low
The box
Paperboard
5% below its 20-year high
Twenty years of US producer price indexes, each deflated by US consumer prices and shown in today’s money. Each panel is scaled to its own high and low, so compare the shapes rather than the heights: the three are indexes on different bases and their levels are not comparable. Source: BLS via FRED, refreshed daily.
The value has moved downstream. The raw wood is scraping the bottom of its twenty-year range while paperboard, the finished box, is close to the top of its own. A landowner and a box plant are looking at the same forest and seeing opposite markets, and the mill closures across Georgia and the Carolinas are what broke the link between them: when the only buyer within a haul radius shuts, the standing tree stops having a price at all while the box it would have become goes on being sold.
The pulp and paper fact sheet charts the middle line, which is what a mill charges for pulp rather than what a grower is paid for a tree. That is the right series for the market it describes and the wrong one for the question above, which is a general hazard with index-based coverage: an index names a stage, and the stages can move in opposite directions for years.
Even the top line is a national average. The number the Southern grower actually faces is regional stumpage, assessed quarterly by TimberMart-South out of the University of Georgia and sold by subscription, so it is not something this site can chart. Free figures do exist in the reporting around it: the University of Georgia and the Texas A&M Forest Service put Q4 2025 pine pulpwood under $4 a ton in southeast Texas against $9 to $14 in south Georgia. That spread, on an identical product a few hundred miles apart, is the strongest evidence available that this is a market defined by haul distance rather than by fibre.
There is a pattern in which tree prices are public and which are not, and it is the same argument the price discovery theme makes. The states that publish free stumpage series, Minnesota, Vermont, Texas and a handful of others catalogued by the US Forest Service, are largely publishing the results of timber sales on public land: the auction happened, the bids are a record, so the price is a record. The American South has no equivalent, because its forest is private. Georgia’s woodlands are 88 percent owned by individuals and businesses, every sale is a bilateral deal between a landowner and a mill, and there is no public transaction to report. So the price has to be assessed by a private surveyor and sold, and the market in the deepest trouble is the one nobody can see.
How to read this page
Three cautions. A twenty-year window is a choice, and a market can sit at a twenty-year low while remaining expensive against a fifty-year one. A position in a range says nothing about direction, since a market at the bottom can stay there for a decade. And the ranking is computed from the last available print of each series, which for the monthly ones can be several weeks old, so this is a description of where prices have got to rather than a live quote.
What the page is good for is the question it makes easy to ask: given that this market is at the edge of its own range, what changed? That question has an answer in every case above, and the answers have almost nothing in common with each other.
Prices from FRED (IMF Primary Commodity Prices, EIA, and BLS producer and import price indexes), deflated by US CPI for all urban consumers. Computed from 41 price series and 31 index series, refreshed daily.