The day’s trading started out hum and glum. Corn and soybean contracts moved modestly like their overnight closes and stayed marginal for most of the day. Soyoil was continuing its recent mostly negative run. Wheat never went anywhere important, high or low. Then there was a breakout late in the session with an effort to break resistance in both corn and soybeans. After being in the hole all day, soyoil began trading both sides of zero and in the end, it pulled out its third higher close in a row. Feeder cattle have been rallying and today broke a new contract high. Carryover and price are not always correlated in a linear fashion. Maybe it doesn’t always seem fair but the U.S. and world stocks to use ratio for corn tightened in...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.