World Perspectives

Equilibration of Food Prices

International trade is supposed to equilibrate prices as the supply of goods or services flow to where they deemed more precious. Hog prices in Europe are currently 57 percent higher than in the U.S., which some believe creates an opportunity for transatlantic pork sales. However, open markets do not automatically overcome price differences caused by transportation, consumer preference, quality, exchange rates and other factors. The EU is a single market, but not all members of the trading bloc belong to the eurozone. Eastern European countries complained about poorer quality food, but their consumers were not always willing or able to pay as much as those in richer parts of Europe. The EU’s geographic preferences reinforce different...

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Market Commentary: Weather Overrides Trade Deal; Cattle Hit New Highs on Tight Inventories

The big news for Monday’s ag market trade wasn’t the U.S.-EU trade deal, but rather continued favorable weather in the U.S. Midwest that will boost corn and soybean yield potential to record or near-record levels. The weather has private analysts boosting yield expectations by sever...

Humiliating; Keep Your Enemies Close; Contradicting

Humiliating U.S. trade talks with China this week are not expected to net anything more than an extension of the current standoff, which means nothing for U.S. soybean exporters. Meanwhile, the trade agreement yesterday between President Trump and EU President Ursua von der Leyen offers up many...

WPI Transportation Report

Dy Bulk Markets  Again this week, the bullish story is the rapid rise in Capesize vessel freight values with demand for Australian iron ore driving most of the rally. The Aussies have seen strong demand for August shipments in particular, which is pushing the forward end of the curve highe...

feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Market Commentary: Weather Overrides Trade Deal; Cattle Hit New Highs on Tight Inventories

The big news for Monday’s ag market trade wasn’t the U.S.-EU trade deal, but rather continued favorable weather in the U.S. Midwest that will boost corn and soybean yield potential to record or near-record levels. The weather has private analysts boosting yield expectations by sever...

Humiliating; Keep Your Enemies Close; Contradicting

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feed-grains soy-oilseeds wheat

Further Identification of Mispricing in Ag Futures

WPI offers the following analysis as a continuation of last week’s work examining mispricing opportunities in agricultural futures. Readers may recall that this work seeks to identify for the major agricultural commodities where along the forward curve current futures have the greatest er...

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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.

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