The dumpster fire that is the wheat market continued to rage on Wednesday with Paris, CBOT, and KCBT markets all scoring new contract lows. The fundamental reason for the weakness is hardly new – rampant competition from the Black Sea and Europe – but prices in the physical market continue to drift below major psychological benchmarks (e.g., $200/MT) in a signal that traders are indeed scrambling to buy demand. To their credit, the corn and soybean markets have remained insulated from the drama in wheat futures and the corn market posted slight gains at mid-week and maintained their sideways trading pattern. Soybeans were no more interesting with mostly lower trade resulting in a fractionally lower close despite modest gains in...
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.