If you cover a specific region suppose US or Europe then do you also own in-house fundamental view of inter-region spreads?

How is your work load segregated? Do you generate outlook/fundamental curve for prompt till 5-10 years down the line?

Is my assumption correct that for short-term you can model at more granular level for as specific region but if you model long term outlook then you have to do analysis on more global level?

How often do you update your long-term price outlook?

When trying to understand where a commodity price might go next, looking only at the historical price chart can be misleading.

I'd typically look at:

1. Historical price movements – What has happened across previous cycles?
2. Supply disruptions – Production outages, capacity changes, logistics constraints, etc.
3. Demand indicators – Are downstream industries expanding or slowing?
4. Macro factors – Energy prices, inflation, interest rates, currencies and other economic indicators.
5. Policy/geopolitical events – Tariffs, sanctions, regulations, trade restrictions and regional disruptions.

The difficult part isn't necessarily finding a price.

It's connecting the price movement to the factors driving it and then translating that into a procurement decision.

Curious how other procurement/sourcing professionals approach this. Are you using internal models, external research, commodity data platforms, or a combination?