The CBOT was lower again at mid-week with funds continuing to pare back long positions amid a light news day. The U.S. weather forecast has shifted to feature more favorable planting conditions for most of the Midwest and Northern Plains in the next few weeks, which helped pressure corn, soybeans, and spring wheat for the day. Brazil’s looming safrinha crop continues to drive much of the market’s price action with better/worse forecasts pushing corn futures to and fro. Similarly, inexpensive wheat from the Black Sea undermines U.S. and other world exporters’ prospects and wheat futures were lower on rumors that U.S. firms may have booked some wheat from Europe for delivery to the Atlantic Coast. Funds were net sellers for...
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.