Kind of like a stock screener but with the ability to sort and search by actual commodities and finished products. Seems everywhere I look the best you can do is sort by industry and sector and then just basic financial metrics.
For example I'm currently researching a company that produces agricultural fertilizer by processing petroleum coke. So their raw input is petroleum coke and the finished product is urea ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
Which begs a lot of questions. How do they stack up against other urea ammonium nitrate fertilizer producers? At best I can find other similar companies but they may have tons of other business ventures and the best I can hope for is to sort by market cap, P/E, etc. It doesn't tell me practically anything about how they compare in the overall urea ammonium nitrate fertilizer market in terms of production output.
Or how about the raw input of petroleum coke? I assume major oil refiners produce a whole bunch of it but again I have no idea about specifics. Who specifically makes the most of it? Who sells it cheapest? Are their different grades of it available at different price points? What does the overall market picture look like? Again pretty much the best I can hope for is to see market cap and P/E and the vast majority of that for major companies probably has nothing to do with the specific petroleum coke aspect of their business.
Furthermore I know practically nothing about petroleum coke or urea ammonium nitrate. Are there uses for other industries? Are there closely related alternatives that have specific advantages or disadvantages?
See what I'm getting at here? I realize this is kind of niche stuff but I find it really interesting and useful. Best I've been able to find is some random stuff on Wikipedia about X company being the largest or 2nd largest producer of Y commodity maybe even what percentage of global output they account for or a reference to their actual annual volume produced in tonnage or whatever if I'm super lucky.
Anybody know of anywhere you can find information like this? Preferably in sortable databases or something? If not I may legitimately take a crack at making something myself especially if other people find the idea interesting.
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