The CBOT opened weaker overnight with funds taking profits following a moderately bearish WASDE yesterday and a key reversal in corn futures. That selling accelerated during the day session with little news to offer support and China and Southeast Asia heading into the Lunar New Years holiday. Funds are thought to have sold 30,000 contracts of corn, 20,000 contracts of soybeans, and 12,000 contracts of wheat. Malaysian palm oil inventories rose to 1.32 MMT at the end of January, up 4.7 percent from the prior year. The stocks build-up came despite a slowdown in production and was due to a 14-year low export pace in January. Despite the news, April palm oil futures rose 1.6 percent overnight and are heading towards an open chart gap at...
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.