Today’s CBOT trade was dominated by poor retail sales and the weekly EIA ethanol and gasoline production/stocks report that proved bearish for both markets. Corn led the CBOT lower after the report and wheat futures dropped into the red amid a seasonally weaker trend and fund selling. Funds are estimated to have sold 6,500 contracts of wheat, 6,000 contracts of corn, and some 3,000 contracts of soybeans. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly retail sales/expenditures data today, which showed the stark impact of COVID-19 quarantines/stay-at-home orders. Total retail sales (including gasoline) were down 6 percent from March 2019 while foodservice sales were down 23 percent. For comparison, the March decline was...
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.