The CBOT was once again mostly lower with traders shedding position length and getting short as U.S. farmers make solid strides seeding the 2024 crop. There are certainly some areas of concern and potential for some acres to be planted to soybeans at the last minute, but the overall outlook is favorable and suggests a relatively worry-free start to the growing season. Corn and wheat were lower on improved weather outlooks for the U.S. and abroad, while the soy complex saw pressure from the Crop Progress data and weaker energy markets. Prices are starting to approach key psychological or technical levels in nearly every ag futures market, which makes technical factors and developments more important for the near-term outlook. With fiv...
Key Market Insights The broad market is locked in on this week’s Trump-Xi meeting in Beijing, but this is no longer just a trade summit. Increasingly, the meeting is becoming tied directly to Iran, energy security, and the growing global economic fallout from disruptions through the Strai...
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.