Traders who weren’t sellers on Thursday quickly jumped on the bandwagon Friday. The CBOT opened lower overnight but mostly consolidated as traders tried to parse out fundamental grain/oilseed weakness from the recent combination of weak macro markets and technical selling. Any overnight strength quickly dissipated at the morning’s open, and the CBOT posted significant losses across all the major grain/oilseed markets (soymeal being the one exception). Corn and soybeans both took out major technical points, though December corn stopped short of violating major trendline support at $5.30. Wheat futures also abandoned their higher trend and settled 12-15 cents lower and below major support. Selling earlier this week was mostly dri...
What You Need to Know Today: The corn and soybean markets closed slightly higher in low-volume trade. The wheat market was mixed, with HRW continuing its downward trek on improved moisture. As expected, the bearish cattle on feed report drove down cattle prices and pulled hogs down with it. Mi...
Monday, 25 May is a U.S. holiday, and both the markets and our office will be closed. Please note that the next issue of Ag Perspectives will be published on Tuesday, 26 May. The WPI staff wishes everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday weekend...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report was released today. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity amounted to 11.6 million head, 102 percent of last year. Source: USDA, WPI Placements were up, but part of that is attributable to persistent drought c...
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.