Methodology

What counts as a price

One thing only: a deal Get Fair Dairy executed itself. A signed dossier, with a product, a volume, an origin and a delivery period. Nothing on the traded curve is modelled, estimated or asked for in a survey.

A bid or an offer never becomes a price on that curve, however real it is. Those levels are published too, in their own book and on their own lines, and they are never mixed with the executed ones.

How a month becomes a point

Every monthly value is the volume-weighted average of the deals in that month. One large deal therefore weighs more than one small one, which is the honest reading of where a market traded.

A month with fewer than three deals is not drawn at all. A curve built on a single print is an anecdote, and drawing it as a firm level would make a thin market look like a reference.

Who the counterparties were

Nobody knows, and that includes us once the data is in. Counterparty names are removed at import, not at display, so no file behind this website has ever contained them.

That is not enough on its own. In a market this size a single row can identify itself — one product, one delivery month, one unusual origin set, and the two parties know exactly which deal they are reading. So a row is published only when at least three deals share its product, month and origin. Where three share the product and month but not the origin, the row is published with the origin generalised to a number of countries. Where neither holds, the row is withheld.

Why the book runs behind

A closed deal is held back for thirty hours, measured from midnight after the trading day rather than from the trade itself — the only reading that can never publish a deal sooner than promised.

It costs a reader nothing but recency, and it takes the edge off the case where a counterparty recognises a deal still being executed around it. Members see the book without that delay: they are the desk's own counterparties, and they are past that risk.

The bid and offer book

Two sources feed it: the desk's own quote archive, under the same disclosure rules as the trade book, and the bids and offers published in our market updates, which were public the day they were written.

A dash in the volume column is not a missing number. It means the original update named no tonnage, and inventing one to fill the column would be the first invented figure on this site.

The public data beside it

Quotations, GDT, Eurostat, USDA, French milk collection, the European price sheet and the customs records are not ours. Each page names its source and its cadence, and links back to it. We collect and organise it; we do not own it and we do not restate it.

Where our own executed average sits beside a public series — butter against the Dutch quotation, for instance — the two are drawn as separate lines over the same weeks. They are never blended into a single number.

That we are a broker, and are paid like one

Get Fair Dairy earns brokerage on executed transactions, and the executed transactions are what these curves are built from. Anyone reading a price here should know that before they read the price.

What that means in practice: this is one broker's own record, published under the rules above. It is not a survey of the market, not an audited index, and not an administered benchmark. It says where business went through this desk, which is a smaller claim than a market price and a more verifiable one.

The rules do not bend for a number the desk would prefer. A published figure is never edited afterwards; when a figure changes because the underlying data was corrected, the change is in the data and the page recomputes from it.