CommodityWatch methodology changelog

Added two monthly Federal Reserve G.17 series for U.S. plastics material and resin manufacturing (NAICS 325211) in the Energy sector's Petrochemicals vertical: seasonally adjusted industrial production (2017=100) and seasonally adjusted capacity utilization (percent). These are industry activity signals, not polyethylene or polypropylene production, physical tonnes, resin consumption, inventory, or spot prices.

The source is the Board of Governors' fixed G.17 seasonally adjusted text files and Monthly Supplement Tables 1B and 2. Normal DemandWatch refreshes retain observation months, release and retrieval times, available preliminary/revised markers, and changed values as revision vintages. A missing latest month is marked delayed. Historical backfill starts from the Board's currently revised file and cannot reproduce all earlier first-release vintages.

The Board's disclaimer places its website information in the public domain unless otherwise marked and asks for attribution. The indicators are attributed to the Board. The Board makes no warranty about data accuracy or completeness.

Added 21 weekly USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Table 9 series: Nearby, 1M forward, and 3M forward rates for Twin Cities, Mid-Mississippi, Illinois River, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Lower Ohio, and Cairo-Memphis. The published history begins 2004-01-07 and retains USDA's week-ending observation date separately from the forward rate month.

Source rates remain in percent of 1976 tariff. Secondary USD/ton context uses USDA's seven location benchmark constants and (rate × benchmark dollars per ton) / 100. The ingestion reads public USDA SODA datasets deqi-uken, svms-9yya, and uuhv-5etw, with 7spn-fbua used for comparable conversion validation. Blank source cells remain missing, revisions are idempotent, and raw retrieval provenance is retained.

Freight is a PriceWatch-only family grouped into seven location cards. The forward transaction tenors are not labelled as forecasts, futures, executable quotes, or an interpolated curve. TimesFM overlays are eligible only for the seven Nearby histories; all 14 forward series are explicitly excluded.

The iShares product pages for IAU and SLV migrated to a new Walrus server-rendered component framework in May 2026. The previous parser (relying on div.product-data-item elements) stopped resolving data. The parser now reads from the KeyFundFactsV3 component embedded in the static HTML, which publishes tonnes directly — no calculation required for current and ongoing observations.

The source continues to publish with an inherent T+2 lag (iShares publication schedule, not a pipeline delay). This has not changed.

Historical IAU and SLV data prior to the series start in this system is not available via a programmatic iShares API — the historical performance download requires a browser-authenticated session. When historical observations are backfilled from the iShares manual download, tonnes are derived from reported ounces of metal where available, or from shares outstanding × a per-share ratio extrapolated backwards using each fund's annual expense rate (IAU 0.25%/yr, SLV 0.50%/yr) anchored to a known current observation. The anchor date and ratio are stored in each backfilled observation's provenance note.

Added PriceWatch TimesFM projections. Projections are generated only when the optional projection step runs after PriceWatch data updates, stored as 12M runs in data/commodities.db, and sliced into 1M, 3M, 6M, and 12M preset horizons when requested in the detail chart.

The methodology now identifies TimesFM 2.5 with checkpoint google/timesfm-2.5-200m-pytorch, cadence regularization, 80% interval storage, audit-only run history, and the non-advice warning shown in the UI.