World Perspectives

Policy Roundup

Options Bias CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton blocked Nadex from launching this week its proposed binary options on political events, like the 2012 presidential election. He forced a 90-day review of what he termed "political poker." Actually, political events can have market impacts, thus the policy section of this daily report. Understanding the more likely outcome can help companies better position themselves for its market implications. A political option would certainly deliver more value to its participants than the hundreds of billions of dollars lost in lotteries each year (AKA, the tax on those who can't do math). Groupthink has its share of follies but experience with the Iowa Electronic Market is that political options can outpe...

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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.

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