CBOT trade continues to be a choppy, range-bound affair, except for an impressive rally in soyoil and continued weakness in wheat futures. Chinese soyoil stocks are at multi-year lows, which supported CBOT soyoil futures on Monday, combined with a healthy dose of speculative buying and bull spreading. Corn and wheat finished lower as export demand remains steady/quiet for both crops. Soybeans posted a modest gain for the day, buoyed mostly by soyoil. Funds are thought to have bought 12,000 contracts of corn on Monday, along with 8,000 contracts of soybeans. Bull spreading was evident in soy products with funds the likely buyers of 6,000 soyoil contracts and sellers of 5,500 soymeal contracts. Funds were net sellers in KCBT wheat but are th...
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.