The CBOT feature one-direction trade at mid-week – lower – with funds continuing to rapidly exit long positions in the grain markets and/or pile into newly profitable short positions. While technical/fund selling drove most of the day’s price action, bearish fundamental factors were also at play. First, rumors broke early in the day that Russia and Ukraine agreed to a new export corridor deal, rumors that were later confirmed. Second, the U.S. dollar rose for the day and pressured wheat and, to a lesser extent, soybean futures as U.S. export competitiveness waned under the rally. Finally, with the exception of North Dakota, the U.S. weather patterns look nearly ideal for planting the 2023 spring crops and for their develop...
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.