Note: WPI chief market analyst Matt Herrington is away on travel until 20 June. It was a modest volume day with trading initially unclear about what direction to take. Corn opened higher, traded both sides but ended down. Soybeans traded both sides but ended lower. Wheat moved higher and stayed there. The beef market knew what direction to take, the same one it has been on, and August live cattle moved to yet another new contract high. That is unlikely to be the last record to be set. USDA’s weekly Export Inspections report showed wheat and soybeans roughly in the middle of analysts’ pre-report estimates, with corn near the top of their expectations. However, it provided little support to today’s corn pricing...
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.