Tanker-Contract Pricing May Shift From Half-Century-Old System
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Traders and investors who bet on the cost of shipping oil may decide next week to move pricing of derivatives away from a method dating back half a century in an effort to spur use of the contracts.
About 50 users of the tanker derivatives will meet Nov. 17 to vote on scrapping so-called Worldscale points as a basis for prices, Jeremy Penn, chief executive officer of the London-based Baltic Exchange, said in an interview yesterday. If a consensus is reached, prices will be uniformly expressed in dollars a metric ton starting in January, he said.