Post-December WASDE trade was mostly lower with trade activity rising well above the dismal volumes of yesterday. The markets opened as called with grains moving lower from the start and soybeans initially trading higher. The surprise of the day session, however, was the early turn lower in the soy complex that came without a fundamental new report/shock. The lack of fundamental justification for the soy weakness is indicative that profit-taking was active and that bulls saw little further upside potential. As the soy complex worked its way lower, that led to additional pressure in corn/wheat and left March corn below technical support points. Funds appear to now be betting on large supply reports from South America, combined with a slow U...
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.