The CBOT was mostly lower overnight in continuation of yesterday’s selling, but the market turned around during the day session. Wheat futures found a bid and helped corn to a higher close as well. Soybeans were on the short end of intercommodity spreads in a relatively low-volume day of trading. USDA did not announce any soybeans sales to China this morning, meaning purchases are likely suspended until tomorrow’s U.S.-Sino meetings have set a general tone for relations going forward. One would expect that positive news (i.e., tweets) coming out of the meetings would spark some additional Chinese purchases. Outside markets were dominated by the continued retracement in crude oil prices and from the Fed’s anno...
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.