Usually, one discusses bears - not bulls - emerging from hibernation, but the somewhat discongruous title of today's report is an accurate image of Wednesday's market activity. The CBOT turned sharply higher at mid-week with corn, the soy complex, wheat, and livestock futures all posting strong gains for the day. The reasoning for each market’s rally was unique, but there were commonalities between all. For grains, the biggest common factor was short covering and increased commercial interest after prices hit either new contract or new selloff lows recently. Traders were looking to take some risk off the table heading into the long July 4th holiday weekend in the U.S., which can often be a period when weather forecasts shift. Given th...
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.