At the end of last year, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) added wholesale hemp pricing data from the market analytics firm Hemp Benchmarks to its online database.
The move “solidifies hemp as a major emerging agricultural commodity,” Jonathan Rubin, the CEO of New Leaf Data Services, Hemp Benchmarks’ parent company, told Hemp Grower. He added that the new partnership with CME would aid the industry’s growth and give farmers, processors, and others the information they need to be successful.
The agreement specifically allows for the wholesale hemp pricing to be used to set “contract terms, negotiate more fairly with counterparties, and better understand the economics of their operations,” Rubin said. The data also has the benefit of “allowing farmers, processors, CPG manufacturers, investors, and other hemp market participants to manage price risk better and hedge their exposure,” he added.
However, the agreement is to distribute Hemp Benchmarks’ data, rather than a case of CME vetting and guaranteeing the information for investment or planning purposes.
Hemp Benchmarks will specifically provide pricing assessments for 21 different products, including CBD biomass, flower, seeds, and clones, crude CBD oil, and CBD distillates as part of CME’s subscription-based data platform, DataMine.
“CME Group is continually exploring new ways to help our DataMine customers make the most informed trading decisions,” Trey Berre, global head of data services at CME Group, said in a press release announcing the deal.
