The current rally in wheat futures is widely known to be driven by fund buying in response to the conflict in the Middle East. Part of the price gains has also been motivated by concerns for the HRW crop in the U.S. Plains amid dry weather and the strong U.S. wheat export pace to date. What has been a little lost in the rally, however, is the growing gap between levels funds have pushed futures to and what can be fundamentally justified. WPI’s latest work indicates that the U.S. balance sheet is indeed growing more bullish – especially when the event tentatively accounts for the Southern Plains dryness – but futures are significantly overbought relative to the fundamentals. The U.S. wheat balance sheet is start...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.