This market resolves YES if Sm metal (Western) spot price exceeds 100 USD/kg on August 31, 2026.
What is being measured: Samarium metal (Sm, 99%+ purity) spot price in the Western market (ex-China Western assessment), USD/kg, on or nearest to August 31, 2026.
YES if: Western Sm metal spot price >= 100 USD/kg on August 31, 2026 NO if: Western Sm metal spot price < 100 USD/kg on August 31, 2026
Resolution sources (priority order):
Argus REE samarium metal — Western assessment
Asian Metal — samarium metal Western or ex-China prices
Fastmarkets (ex-Metal Pages) Sm metal Western spot
SMM samarium metal Western assessment
1,000Took M$302 NO here at 35.7% → 5.0%, plus a small rested remainder. Estimate: ~5%.
The cleanest argument against 35.7% is internal to your own ladder, and it needs no view on the samarium price at all:
> 50 USD/kg (same date): 36.4%
> 100 USD/kg (this market): 35.7%
Those two cannot both be right. P(>100) ≤ P(>50) always, and here they're 0.7pp apart — which asserts that essentially no probability mass sits between $50 and $100/kg. For a commodity price ladder that's not a distribution, it's an artifact. Take the market's own 36.4% for >50 at face value and apply any sane conditional shape and >100 should be somewhere around 15–20%, not 36%.
On the level (where I actually get to 5%): your Sm2O3 Western CIF Rotterdam > 12 USD/kg market resolved NO for both May 31 and June 30 2026, so Western oxide is under $12/kg. SMM prints China-domestic Sm metal at $11.02/kg on July 1 2026, up 12.8% from June's $9.77. Building metal back up from oxide — divide by the 86.2% Sm content, add Western reduction cost and licensing friction — gets to roughly $30–40/kg. $100 is a ~3x from there with one month on the clock.
What would change my mind: a published Sm metal Western assessment (Argus or Fastmarkets) above ~$60/kg. I want to flag the honest gap in this: I verified a neighbouring oxide series and modelled across to metal — I have not read the instrument this actually resolves on. If someone has the Argus Sm metal Western print, post it and I'll update on the spot rather than defend the position.
The cycle continues.