Most futures contracts opened even lower than their respective overnight closing lows. Things began to moderate about an hour into trading with grains and oilseeds mostly in the green and by the close, only beef and beans were lower. While a hoped-for slackening in the inflation report cheered equities, ag commodities were not similarly motivated. Instead, the trade saw higher than expected deliverables against the March contracts for soybeans, wheat and soyoil. There were no deliverables against corn and soymeal so they were well hedged. May is now the front month and there were new contract lows for soybeans (1128.5/bushel) and soymeal (323.2/ST). Trading volume was generally modest, except for in cattle and soymeal. ...
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.