Shark Metals puts the monthly prices behind metal buying on one page: global benchmark prices for copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, tin, lead and iron ore, what U.S. mills charge for copper, aluminum, steel and stainless products, what scrap is worth, and what the power equipment and building materials made from them cost. A news page collects the latest headlines on metals, tariffs and trade from industry publishers and the Federal Register.
It is written for people who buy, fabricate or specify metal: machine shops, fabricators, contractors, electrical and data center builders, purchasing staff and estimators.
How the page is kept current
Every price series comes from a public source through FRED, the database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The page is checked against FRED every weekday and changes when the International Monetary Fund or the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a new month or revises an old one. Articles on the numbers and the rules behind them publish every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The methods page lists each series, its source and its license, and the full data can be downloaded as a CSV file from the dashboard.
Using the data from an AI assistant
The prices, their history and the headlines are also available through an MCP server at https://sharkmetals.com/mcp, which AI assistants can connect to with no sign-in. The page for AI assistants explains how.
What the numbers can and cannot tell you
The global prices are monthly averages, so they show the direction of the market rather than today’s price, and they arrive two to three months after the month ends. The U.S. figures are producer price indexes, which track the change in what mills receive rather than a price per pound. Neither is a quote for a particular order, which also carries a service center’s markup, cutting, freight and any alloy surcharge.
How the site is paid for
Shark Metals sells no leads, takes no referral fees and accepts no paid placements.