The CBOT was mostly higher heading into the WASDE as funds were cautiously covering shorts and paring back risk before the holidays. The WASDE proved to be slightly bullish corn and mostly neutral soybeans and wheat, proving the short-covering trend to have been a good idea. Aside from the WASDE, there was little fresh news for the commodity markets and with the report now past, commodity markets are likely to enter their seasonal holiday lull while keeping a close eye on export demand, which is the major factor driving price action right now. The major theme from the WASDE was for tighter U.S. and global corn stocks on rising demand, and a mostly steady scenario for the wheat market. USDA raised the demand outlook for U.S. wheat exports an...
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.
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...
Key Takeaways: The latest UN data shows solid progress reducing global hunger and food insecurity. The geography of hunger-affected people has shifted substantially, however, and Africa is now the most affected region. To understand why hunger patterns have shifted and what policy option...
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...