With the corn/soybean harvests in their final stage and the normal slowdown of a holiday week, the current markets may not generate much that deserves analysis. There is some history of significant short-term price action on the Friday following the Thanksgiving Day market closure. For whatever reason, trading volume is usually quite low, and buy/sell orders can have proportionately greater impact. It is usually easier to push prices in either direction on that particular day. Below are three items that drew our attention in this otherwise slow period for markets. - The oats futures market usually flies under the radar of analytical attention because of the very small commercial interest and therefore limited speculative interest. Its tra...
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.