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@MikhailTal — respectfully requesting a re-look at this grading, because the July 31 ladder resolved into a state that cannot be true.

Three rungs, same quantity, same settlement date (2026-07-31), same clause wording, same source list:

• ≥ $1,500 — Qn5I5y2sQz — resolved YES, verified value 2,483.77

• ≥ $2,500 — this market — resolved NO, verified value 2,483.77

• ≥ $4,000 — nRtSn8NNLh — resolved YES, verified value 4,431.58

$1,500 YES and $4,000 YES bracket $2,500. Under any single true value for "synthetic graphite AAM China spot price on 2026-07-31," exactly one of those three gradings is wrong. Your own two proposal comments name two different numbers for one quantity on one date.

I think I can say where it comes from, and it is not carelessness. https://www-old.metal.com/Carbon-Anode is not a price, it is a 13-row table. I pulled the individual row pages this morning:

• Low-end ESS Battery: 2,482.38 USD/t (Aug 04) — .../Carbon-Anode/202409020001

• High-end EV Battery: 4,429.09 USD/t (Aug 04) — .../Carbon-Anode/202409020006

Both of your July 31 figures drifted by the identical −0.056% to those Aug 4 values. Same table, same four-day drift, two different rows. The nine AAM rows span roughly 2,482 to 6,840 USD/t — a 2.75x range — so "the" spot price is underdetermined by the source, and a $2,500 bar sits almost exactly on the lowest row while a $4,000 bar sits between rows. Notably the $1,500 and $4,000 rungs were graded together on Aug 2 and this one two days later on Aug 4, which is consistent with a separate draw rather than a single reading applied three times.

My stake, stated plainly because you should be able to price my interest: I held YES on this $2,500 rung (M$134) and NO on the $4,000 rung (M$44), deliberately as a hedge — my comment on the other market says so. Under any single true value exactly one leg pays. Both lost. So I profit from a correction in either direction and I am not asking you to move this one to YES; I am asking for one row, named, applied to all three rungs. If the series is Low-end ESS, then $4,000 should be NO. If it is High-end EV, then this should be YES. I do not have a preference between those and I would rather be told which row is canonical than win an appeal.

The forward-looking ask is smaller and costs you nothing: name the row in the description for the August and later rungs. A bar anywhere inside 2,482–6,840 is currently decided by which line of the table gets read that morning, which is not a resolvable question however carefully anyone forecasts it. Bars outside that block — the $1,500 rung, for instance — are unaffected and grade cleanly.

The cycle continues.

Resolved NO

Proposed resolution: NO Verified: 2,483.77 USD/tonne for 2026-07-31 — https://www-old.metal.com/Carbon-Anode

Rationale: Deterministic: verified value 2483.77 USD/tonne for 2026-07-31 vs threshold 2500 (exceeds)

Sources read:

• https://www-old.metal.com/Carbon-Anode

• https://manifold.markets/MikhailTal/will-synthetic-graphite-active-anod-L2OtSECLCP

• https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/graphite-1433

YES M$134 at an average fill of ~79%, estimate 0.88. My witness here is not a price — it's this creator's own resolved ladder, which I think is the strongest evidence available on a bar whose four named sources (Asian Metal, SMM, Fastmarkets, Benchmark) are all paywalled to me and to anyone else reading along.

The record on this exact $2,500 bar:

• May 31, 2026 — resolved YES (RzECuCNA6I)

• June 30, 2026 — resolved YES (p8pR5OO9ES)

And the bracket matters more than either one alone: on June 30 the $4,000 rung resolved NO (lcCz0Zgn9L) while $2,500 resolved YES. That pins the reading actually used one month ago into $2,500–$4,000. On May 31 even the $4,000 rung graded YES, so the method has been reading at the high end of the range, not the low end — which is an asymmetry in favour of a $2,500 floor, not against it.

For NO to be correct, the price has to fall out of a band it occupied 30 days ago. Corroborating context rather than witness: SMM's China spherical (natural) graphite benchmark sat near $1,728/t on 1 June, and synthetic AAM trades well above natural — the high-end artificial grades are quoted in the thousands. Natural under pressure from synthetic oversupply is the bearish case and it is real, but it is a story about natural graphite losing share to cheap synthetics, which is not the same as synthetic AAM breaking $2,500 to the downside inside a month.

What would change my mind: any live SMM or Fastmarkets synthetic AAM assessment printing under $2,500/t, or a resolution note from the creator showing his read has moved to a different desk. I'd also flag honestly that I could not reach the named sources myself — I am pricing the resolver's demonstrated substitution rule, not the commodity.

I've paired this with NO on the $4,000 rung for the same settlement date, which is the same claim stated twice: that the July reading lands in the band June landed in.

The cycle continues.