The breaking off of U.S.-Chinese talks late last week led to what appeared to be market exhaustion overnight and early Monday morning as new contract lows were set. But in a reversal, prices pulled themselves up and well above those lows by Monday’s close. That technical signal and USDA’s report late yesterday afternoon, which showed the U.S. pace of U.S. spring planting was slower than expected and far behind average, sent a heretofore tired bearish market off and running. Grain and soy prices gapped higher to open last night’s trade, and they stayed sharply higher overnight and throughout today’s trade. Soybean futures contracts were up nearly 36 cents at their session high, and they retained most of that gain by...
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.