Corn and wheat turned higher on Tuesday while the soy complex sold off despite strength in palm oil futures. Rumors that the EPA will soon announce its biofuels mandates, including a report from Reuters citing unnamed sources, helped support corn and ethanol demand expectations while painting a more bearish picture for soyoil and soybean. Overall, however, trade was lackluster with funds and traders mostly adjusting positions heading into the December WASDE. The most excitement of the day was in lean hog futures, which posted triple-digit losses on position liquidation and rapidly deteriorating technical conditions. Outside markets were sharply higher as investors adopted a “risk on” attitude with increasing confirmation...
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.