Today’s March USDA WASDE report did nothing to temper the bearish mood in both commodity and equity markets. Volume was light ahead of the WASDE release and stayed that way. While corn and soybeans traded mostly in the green ahead of the report, wheat had no reason to be bullish. There was lots of two sided trading, including in Feeder Cattle where the April contract was taken above resistance, and then closed on a loss. The big print changes in the WASDE, which were in fact small, included the following: Corn: USDA left the domestic corn balance sheet unchanged but reduced global beginning stocks, while increasing production and use, and ultimately lowering world ending stocks. Soybeans: The agency marginally reduced domestic seed us...
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.