The CBOT showed mixed trends across its major ag markets on Wednesday with corn and KC wheat finding some short covering that stabilized values and led to small gains. A big part of the stability that came to corn futures was from a flood of export interest that has recently entered the market. Conversely, CBOT wheat and the soy complex saw early fundamentally-based selling push values below thresholds that, subsequently, triggered technical selling. Cattle futures jumped to fresh all-time highs for the day with strong early-week cash trade supporting the move. Positive news from the U.S. GDP numbers and the Federal Reserve’s decisions to hold interest rates steady also boosted bullish sentiments in the livestock sector. Traders are a...
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.