Here at Materials Risk we are always trying to find the best ways to stay in touch with commodity markets. Real time access to commodity markets and key market drivers can be a great help when negotiating with a supplier or trying to understand what the risks are to your supply chain.
As well as being free all of these apps are available on both Android and iPhone. We tested them on a Google Nexus 7. We believe our top 3 apps, listed below tick all the boxes. However, if you know of any other better ones please let us know in the comments section below.
Bloomberg
You can tailor the news to broad categories – energy and commodities but it doesn’t allow you to focus in any more detail. The app includes live prices from the main commodity markets including energy, precious metals, base metals and agricultural commodities. You have to click refresh to get the latest prices which isn’t too much of a problem if your not trading there and then. The main gripe is the lack of charts, not even one.
Gold Live!
In comparison Gold Live! focuses on base and precious metal prices, offering a more comprehensive coverage than Bloomberg. In addition to gold/silver/platinum Gold Live! also includes palladium and rhodium. On base metals Gold Live! adds prices for nickel, aluminium, zinc, lead and uranium in addition to copper. All base and precious metals are live and auto-update. They do add in WTI crude prices but these are delayed by 20 minutes. Gold Live! offers charts for all commodities and technical charts for the main precious metals. The news service is split between gold, silver and base metals but the news seemed to be mixed up so wasn’t easy to follow.
Overall: Gold Live! focuses on precious and base metals, great market interface, news service not well defined.
Thomson Reuters
The most comprehensive list of commodities of all the apps featured. Thomson Reuters includes prices from the main commodity markets but also includes Euronext, TGE and ASXF. Prices for all commodities are delayed by around 5-10 minutes and only show the current price, without any reference to daily change. The interface is not very user-friendly with prices for different commodities and different exchanges all mixed up. The news service leaves much to be desired with no facility to filter by energy or commodity. No charts unfortunately.
Overall: Thomson Reuters has by far the most comprehensive coverage of commodities, prices are delayed, user interface lets it down slightly.
Difficult to pick a clear winner out of these three. They all offer something of value depending on what your needs are. The best advice we can give is to try all 3 of them and see which one best suits you. Our overall pick for a winner is Bloomberg. For pure ease of use and comprehensive coverage of commodity markets this takes some beating.