OPIS Rack Benchmarks Explained

OPIS Rack Benchmarks: Built to Reflect the Market, Not Distort It

If you’re responsible for multi‑million‑gallon fuel contracts, you already know that the benchmark you choose can be as consequential as the prices themselves. A few distorted postings in the wrong structure can ripple through RFPs, supplier scorecards, and executive reviews — and suddenly you’re defending a number that doesn’t quite line up with how the market actually traded.

OPIS Rack Benchmarks — delivered via OPIS Rack Reports and OPIS RackPro — are designed to solve exactly that problem. The way we collect, structure, and quality‑check rack prices is built to reflect how fuel is really bought and sold, so you can use benchmarks with confidence when working with counterparties, auditors, and presenting to leadership.

In this post, we’ll walk through three design choices that make OPIS different:

1. Fair weighting by supplier, not by terminal.
2. Time structures that match how you actually buy.
3. Smarter outlier handling that blends automation with human insight.

1. Give every supplier a fair voice in the benchmark

In many markets, the loudest voice in the benchmark isn’t the most competitive supplier — it’s the one storing the most products at the terminals. Terminal-level benchmarks overweight suppliers that post at multiple terminals in the same city, simply because their prices appear more times in the average.

OPIS does the opposite. Our methodology normalizes the influence of each supplier so no one participant can tilt your benchmark high or low just by virtue of posting in more places.

Standard Display: one supplier, one price per market

For the Standard Display, OPIS selects a primary terminal for each supplier in each rack city and uses that single posting in the benchmark. In other words: one supplier = one price per market.

That seemingly small design choice has big implications:

• A supplier with five terminals doesn’t appear five times in the average.
• If a supplier happens to be the high or low poster on a given day, they only carry the weight of one observation — not many.

For you, that means the benchmark you rely on for contracts and reconciliations isn’t quietly skewed toward whichever suppliers have the broadest terminal footprint. It’s a cleaner, more structurally fair reflection of the competitive landscape.

Terminal Display: full granularity when you need it

There are times when you do need to see every posting: pipeline economics, terminal‑level margin analysis, branded vs. unbranded comparisons, and location‑specific sourcing decisions. That’s where the Terminal Display comes in.

In OPIS Terminal reports, you get:

• Every posted price for every supplier at every terminal in the market.
• A terminal‑level average that incorporates all those postings for operational and logistics‑driven use cases.

Choose the lens that matches your decision

Inside OPIS RackPro, you don’t have to pick just one structure and live with it. Users can toggle between Standard and Terminal views — or use both side by side.

That flexibility lets you:

• Reconcile contracts and audits against a clean, non‑skewed benchmark.
• Then drill straight down into terminal‑level detail when you’re optimizing lift strategies or explaining local anomalies to stakeholders.

With OPIS, benchmark structure is a feature, not an accident. You can align your analysis with how your contracts are written instead of accepting a one‑size‑fits‑all index.

2. Align your benchmark with how you actually buy fuel

Markets move continuously; contracts, dispatch windows, and government RFPs often don’t. The gap between how prices trade intraday and how contracts are structured in the real world can create painful disconnects — especially when you’re justifying why a specific index was chosen.

We bridge that gap by creating multiple daily snapshots, so you and your counterparty can structure contract times around a benchmark that reflects your actual buying patterns.

Three industry‑standard benchmark times

OPIS supports three widely recognized benchmark times that show up again and again in rack supply agreements and tenders:

• Contract Average (10:00 a.m. ET): Commonly used as the cost basis in rack supply agreements, this view captures the early trading dynamics that many contracts are keyed to.
• Closing Average (4:59 p.m. ET): An end‑of‑day snapshot that reflects all intraday moves before the traditional 6 p.m. supplier reset, giving you a final market view for contract and P&L alignment.
• Calendar Day Average (11:59 p.m. ET) Calculated nightly, this benchmark incorporates all price changes effective between 5:00 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. ET — ideal when you need a fully finalized rate before the following morning.

These three anchors cover the most common contractual definitions of “the price of the day” that auditors and counterparties expect to see.

13 frozen snapshots every day

Of course, not every lift or dispatch lines up neatly with those three moments. That’s why OPIS doesn’t stop there. Beyond the core benchmarks, we generate 13 frozen snapshots of the market every day — spanning early morning, midday, afternoon, and multiple evening “6‑to‑6” runs.

That gives you the flexibility to:

• Use an evening benchmark, just after the 6:00 p.m. price resets, for fleets that turn their book over at the start of each day.
• Choose a mid‑morning index that captures intraday moves important to your dispatch cycle or RFP rules.

In practice, that means you can match your benchmark to when you actually lift, dispatch, or invoice, instead of forcing operations to contort around a single arbitrary timestamp.

Live prices when timing is everything

For trading desks and real‑time dispatch, you sometimes need more than frozen history. OPIS also publishes live rack prices between benchmark times, and RackPro streams those updates directly to your screen.

Inside the platform, you can:

• See where current prices sit relative to the frozen benchmarks written into your contracts.
• Make faster decisions about when to lift, rebid, or adjust pricing — with full context for how your contract index will ultimately settle.

In summary,  OPIS doesn’t force you to bend your operations to one fixed timing. You can choose from 13 daily snapshots plus live prices, and lock contracts to the timing your auditors and counterparties already recognize.

3. Smarter outlier handling: automation plus human judgment

Ask anyone who has managed a rack index: outliers can make or break your day.

Most systems treat “weird” prices as something to delete — any value that looks far from the pack gets tossed by default. But in wholesale fuels, the strange print is sometimes the only one that’s actually telling you where stress is building: a distressed seller, a liquidity squeeze, a branded/unbranded inversion, or a sharp move against spot.

OPIS quality control is built around that reality. We collect roughly 99% of publicly posted rack prices directly from suppliers or from their customers, and we require multiple independent sources to validate each price before it’s eligible for inclusion in a benchmark.

From there, we use a hybrid approach:

Analysis and rules find the flags — humans make the call

Automated processes continuously scan for prices that look unusual compared with recent history or the rest of the market — for example, sudden deviations from prior postings or sharp divergences from peer suppliers.Those prices are flagged, not automatically thrown out. Instead, experienced OPIS analysts review the flags, in context, before deciding whether an update should be kept in or excluded from the benchmark.

Branded vs. unbranded context (and more) really matters

At first glance, a posting might look like a clear outlier. But once you separate branded vs. unbranded prices, or view the move relative to spot and pipeline conditions, the “odd” number may turn out to be perfectly logical.

OPIS explicitly compares suspect values against these segments and market backdrops before altering the benchmark:

• Consideration is given to how the rack price stacks up with the spot market that supplies the rack and also with observed contract price values, both at a discount to posted prices and at a premium to them
• If a low unbranded price reflects where real trades are happening in a soft market, we may keep it in — even when a simple algorithm would have deleted it as an outlier.
• If, after deeper checks, a price truly doesn’t pass muster, OPIS will exclude it from the benchmark so it doesn’t distort your indices.

In summary, OPIS uses deep analysis and automation to catch anomalies, but never lets an algorithm unilaterally decide what the market “should” be. Every override is a human-made decision, not a default, resulting in benchmarks that are both mathematically rigorous and commercially realistic.

Why this matters if you run fuel procurement, pricing, or risk

If you’re on the hook for fuel procurement, risk, or pricing, you’re the person who has to explain the number on the page — to suppliers, to your auditors, and to your own leadership team.

The OPIS Rack Benchmarks are built to give you:

• Benchmarks that don’t over‑weight any one supplier or terminal, so structure doesn’t quietly bias your contracts.
• The freedom to switch between Standard and Terminal views in seconds, depending on whether you’re negotiating, reconciling, or optimizing dispatch.
• Contract‑ready indices at three widely recognized benchmark times, plus 10 additional snapshots and live prices, so you can match your index to how and when you actually buy.
• Quality control that understands the difference between a bad print and a real market move, anchored in both automation and human judgment.

That combination is what turns a static price file into a defensible benchmark, one you can stand behind in negotiations, audits, and boardrooms alike.

OPIS Rack benchmarks are available wherever you work: via API, the OPIS RackPro platform, leading third‑party market data providers, email, or FTP.

If you’d like to see how this structure would look on your markets, the next step is simple: bring your key rack cities and contract terms to OPIS, and we can walk you through exactly how your benchmarks would behave under this framework.