Over the past several days, optimism over a U.S. – China trade agreement helped push commodities up into new trading ranges and funds are trying to shed their short positions. As happens, now the skepticism settles in due to a lack of concrete signed documents. However, China’s officials are still speaking positively about the deal, they are lowering tariffs, and they are active purchasers of American commodities. Collectively, this is keeping doubters on the defensive. One China-based analyst says that President Xi Jinping does not want relations with the U.S. to slide worse than they have already. Overall, the market is trending higher as fall backs are shallow. The funds don’t want to get trapped against the trend. But,...
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.