The CFTC was mostly lower to end the week with funds emerging as profit-takers in corn, soybeans, and Chicago wheat. The soyoil market scored a new contract high on news of a palm oil export ban from Indonesia, however, and the KCBT wheat market strengthened on continued poor weather forecasts for the U.S. southern Plains. Funds were net buyers of soyoil on Friday, adding some 12,000 contracts to their long position. For every other major ag product, however, they were net sellers. Funds liquidated 17,000 contracts of corn, 3,000 contracts of wheat, 12,000 contracts of soybeans, and 8,000 contracts of soymeal. Notably, open interest in the major ag products continues to decline as profit taking and position liquidation have gained po...
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.