Why Your FCO Is Not Getting Responses

If you are sending Full Corporate Offers into the market and hearing nothing back, it is worth understanding what happens at the other end. A working commodity desk receives dozens of these a week. Almost all of them are deleted inside thirty seconds, and the reasons are consistent enough to be worth listing.

It has been forwarded too many times

The first thing an experienced desk looks at is not the price. It is the provenance. An offer that has visibly passed through several hands, with forwarding headers, multiple signatures, or a price that has clearly been marked up along the way, tells the reader that they are looking at the end of a broker chain rather than at a seller.

Nobody wants to be the seventh party on a chain. There is no margin left, no ability to verify anything, and no realistic prospect of the chain holding together to a signed contract. The offer is deleted, and so is the next one from the same address.

The specification is incomplete

An offer that says chrome 40 to 42% and nothing else is not a specification, it is a headline. A buyer needs sizing, moisture, the chrome to iron ratio, and who did the assay. Coal offers that give a calorific value without ash, sulphur and the certificate of analysis are the same problem. Iron ore quoted on Fe alone, with no silica, alumina, phosphorus or sulphur, cannot be evaluated at all.

The reader is not being difficult. They physically cannot price your material from what you have given them, and they are not going to spend an email asking, because ten more offers arrived while they were reading yours.

The terms are unrealistic

A small number of terms mark an offer as coming from somebody who has not shipped before. Asking for a substantial prepayment before any relationship exists. Demanding proof of funds before disclosing anything about the material. Naming a price with no reference to the index the commodity actually trades against. Requiring the buyer to sign an exclusive non circumvention agreement before they have been told what the product is.

Each of these individually can be explained. Together they read as somebody protecting a position they may not hold.

The volume does not match the delivery term

A free on board coal cargo of 5,000 tonnes will not be taken seriously, because it does not fit any vessel class the trade uses. Ten thousand tonnes of chrome offered as a single spot lot from a plant with no track record raises the same question. Buyers read volume and delivery term together, and a mismatch suggests the seller has not thought through the logistics.

There is no evidence anybody has seen the material

Photographs of the actual stockpile with something in frame for scale. A recent assay certificate with a laboratory reference number. A plant or mine location that can be found on a map. An offer with none of these is asking to be taken entirely on trust, in a market where a great deal of material offered does not exist.

What to do instead

Stop sending Full Corporate Offers into distribution. Write a short direct message to one counterparty at a time. Say what the material is, what the assay says and who issued it, how much you have and how much you can hold per month, where it sits, and on what basis you are selling. Attach the assay. Offer photographs and a site visit.

That message will get read, because it does the reader's work for them and because it is obviously from somebody close to the physical material. It is also considerably shorter than the document you have been sending.

And be ready for the answer to be no

A desk that comes back within a day and says the grade does not fit their buyer, or the volume is below what they can work, has done you a favour. It costs you nothing and you can go and spend your time elsewhere. The offers to worry about are the ones that generate enthusiastic replies, requests for your full documentation pack, and then silence.