After testing bottoms earlier this week, the commodity market (like equities) reversed on short covering and moved higher. Fund buying was active, and the spread trade was pushed by major funds rolling their positions this week. The weather forecast suggests the possibility of some rain this weekend but not nearly enough for a hot and dry eastern part of the U.S. Midwest. Thus, the semblance of a weather premium is being put in place ahead of Monday’s release of USDA’s August WASDE. The report itself gives impetus for coverage. Most expect it to reduce the estimates for corn and soybean production as well as for corn and wheat stocks. The soybean carryover will be more plentiful due to China’s purchase embargo. On the pr...
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.