There was generally low volume in grains today as traders await USDA’s important reports on Friday. There is no reason to spend more money on fees or commissions after spending several days aligning with the perceived outcomes. At the same time, market noise does not completely stop and there is inevitably a little bit of second guessing. But the trading that does occur has narrowed in range. Barring any significant development, this will be the result of edginess until noon EST on Friday. There is plenty of volatility in outside markets, but things are mostly in a holding pattern for ags.Part of the position squaring this week ahead of Friday’s USDA January WASDE report is the trade’s assumptions about the final production numbers for the...
What You Need to Know Today: Oil prices surged today following reports of tanker attacks off the coast of Saudi Arabia by Houthi rebels and renewed U.S. threats to escalate military strikes against Iran, heightening concerns over potential disruptions to Middle East energy supplies. Brent crud...
USDA’s monthly cattle on feed report for 1 July will be released tomorrow. Analysts’ pre-report consensus estimates are for the total inventory on feed to be 102.2 percent of last year. Those estimates imply an on-feed inventory of 11.327 million head. If accurate, that would be the...
Key Takeaways: The situation in the Arab Gulf is little changed this week, which is to say it is a day-by-day – and sometimes hour-by-hour – judgment call as to what is or will happen. There are some vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, but transits are a fraction of what they...
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.