Corn, the soy complex, and cattle futures each saw extended weakness in Thursday’s CBOT trade with the crop markets coming under pressure from favorable weather conditions and forecasts for the U.S. There is increasing market chatter about record breaking yields for both corn and soybeans this year, and it’s hard for bulls to gain any market leverage when such sentiments pervade. The cattle markets fell sharply lower on a combination of technical factors and sluggish trade in the cash markets that left spec traders unwilling to hold positions with values near recent highs. Wheat was really the only market to see appreciable strength for the day as weather concerns for the U.S., Canadian, European, and Black Sea spring wheat crop...
From WPI Consulting
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.