USDA released its monthly Cattle on Feed (COF) report today after the market close, and it showed inventory below market expectations, a bullish factor. However, the more significant potential bull market driver is the gap between expected and actual placements. That is only part of the story, though. More will be known Tuesday about how corn planting went this week, but it is safe to say that the current year corn crop has officially been marked tardy. As of last week, USDA reported corn planting was 49 percent complete compared with the five-year average of 80 percent. Add to that, only 19 percent of the planted crop as of last week had emerged versus the five-year average of 49 percent. This means it could be an expensive summer for cat...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.