Today’s trade was essentially a reversal of recent trends with wheat higher, soybeans flat and corn rising above $3.50/bushel. The cattle complex was sharply higher as buyer activity picked up on cash market transactions and technical buying. After their bearish key reversal on the chart yesterday, both the Dow and S&P 500 stock indexes turned higher today with each up 1 percent as of this writing. The CBOE VIX Index has remained elevated and not trading below 11.18 today, the first time such a feat has occurred this year. COMEX gold futures are mixed with the January and March contracts higher as the February and April contracts moved lower on spreading activity. The U.S. Dollar Index is 7.5 points lower at 90.391, which has bee...
The corn and soy complex closed higher, with the wheat market mixed, as winter wheat closed up but spring wheat and livestock ended lower. Part of the strength for corn and soybeans may have been a weather premium, as crop planting has started out fast but warm weather has been slow to develop...
Real GDP grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026, slightly below the consensus expectation of 2.3 percent but above the 0.5 percent growth in Q4 2025. The GDP number matches the average annualized pace of growth since the peak back in late 2007, right before the Financial P...
Reflect for a moment on what you eat. There is a lot of advice out there in the ether about what you should eat, but really, what do you currently eat and how much? The good people at the USDA have some data for you, to help you answer that question. USDA says that we eat quite a bit of meat. L...
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.