USDA’s much anticipated Prospective Plantings and Quarterly Stocks reports had few shockers, but they did shuffle the board a bit. First, the top line stuff: Corn Planted area was expected to drop due to higher input costs and lower prices, but USDA’s 90-million-acre number was at the bottom of industry expectations, and only one of 13 analysts surveyed came close to this number. Quarterly corn stocks were expected to be higher, but USDA’s number was less than the median level. Market Reaction: The trade bounced around in single digits ahead of the reports but jumped double digits higher following their release. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the corn pit. Soybeans The soybean/corn ratio was...
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.