I was curious about how well the reported prices for 99.5%...

I was curious about how well the reported prices for 99.5% Lithium Carbonate in china correlated to our realised BMX prices historically. The idea being that it could be a good data source to project future BMX Sales price. So I did the following:

1. Picked a market/provider - went with "Shanghai Oujin Industrial Co., Ltd."
2. Grabbed the graph here: http://www.100ppi.com/mprice/detail-3001851.html
3. Used some software to attempt to turn the graph back into some raw data, this isn't perfect - only so much precision you can get out of fairly low resolution graphs
4. Chuck it in excel and plot & analyze the data

I produced this chart:




To keep everything on roughly the same scale, i've scaled down the Lithium Carbonate price (yuan/T) by a factor of 100. I found that there was a strong correlation between the carbonate price and BMX sales price - which i'm sure is of no surprise to anyone.

Orange: Lithium carbonate price (99.5%), scaled down by a factor of 100. Original units were Yuan/T of 99.5% Lithium Carbonate
Yellow: I used the last few sales to find an average ratio of 0.014261 of BMX prices to Lithium Carbonate prices. This is the expected BMX price using that ratio for the reported carbonate price.
Green: The actual BMX results

So using that chart, I would expect that a BMX auction if held today would fetch a price of approx $8,913 USD/T (normalized to 6% Spod) - an approx 13.8% increase to the last auction.

Usual disclaimers apply: This isn't financial advice, i'm not an expert, DYOR, etc.