The CBOT found plenty of support today from the weekend attack in Saudi Arabia that sent crude oil futures sharply higher. Between the support building late last week anyway, the weekend news was sufficient to keep sellers at bay in nearly every commodity except soymeal. Soyoil, biodiesel and ethanol have opportunities to directly benefit from higher crude oil prices and October ethanol futures finished 3 percent higher. This afternoon, USDA noted that corn and soybean crop conditions ratings stayed essentially the same, with historically low percentages in the good/excellent categories. The crops remain stubbornly behind in their maturity, though good weather will help that process continue this week. If you haven’t already, you sho...
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.