The market opened mixed but ended mostly in the green. Prices were boosted by decent export sales, especially in wheat, very few deliveries against expiring May contracts, and of course short-covering. Although corn rallied back today it still lacks the rationale for a move higher. Unless China does something uncharacteristic, the overhang of surplus stocks is not going to go away. The International Grains Council (IGC) lowered its projected global grain use in 2019/20, including deleting 11 MMT of corn used for ethanol. Thirty-five percent of U.S. ethanol plants are off-line and the remaining 140 plants are running below capacity. There are visibly more cars on the road this week than in the past, but travel will remain...
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.