Despite the large fund investment in the soybean market, soybean futures prices have stayed in a trading range during the past two months that reflects the conflict between funds’ desire to be long amid a rather bearish fundamental outlook.Monday’s Wall Street Journal carried an article describing how after years of little or no growth, investors finally see hope that the global economy has begun to expand, and that hope has inspired some of them to re-enter commodity markets. This has led to a surge of managed investment money flowing back into commodities. A great deal of managed money pools had been forced out of those markets after commodity prices collapsed in 2015. At the same time, investors pulled money out of long-only index fund p...
What You Need to Know Today: Commodities were mostly lower across the board today after yesterday’s Federal Reserve meeting hinted at a potential interest rate hike later in 2026. The dollar index reached its highest level in over a year, and a strong dollar makes U.S. agricultural expor...
Tomorrow is the Juneteenth federal holiday, and the USDA, along with the rest of the federal government and the CME, will be closed, so the monthly Cattle on Feed report was released a day early. The total number of cattle on feed in feedlots with 1,000 head or more capacity on 1 June amounted...
From WPI Consulting
Forecasting developments in production agriculture
On behalf of a private U.S. agricultural technology provider, WPI’s team generated an econometric model to forecast the movement of concentrated corn production north and west from the traditional U.S. Corn Belt. WPI’s model has subsequently provided quantitative support to a multi-million-dollar investment into short-season corn variety development. WPI’s methodology included a series of interviews with regional grain elevators and seed consultants. Emphasizing outreach and communication with stakeholders who possess intimate sectoral knowledge – on-the-ground insights – is a regular component of WPI’s methodologies, made possible by WPI’s ever-growing network of industry contacts.