Index publishers such as New York-based Platts and London-based Argus Media play a peculiar role in global commodity markets. By publishing daily prices for a huge variety of energy commodities – from seaborne cargoes of Brent North Sea crude oil to natural gas delivered to the Houston Ship Channel – they shed light on otherwise opaque markets and provide pricing data used by thousands of market participants. Financial firms that would never touch a barrel of physical oil rely on them too, since