It has been a few years since markets were whipsawed by a series of inexplicable quarterly stocks surprises from USDA. Even if those numbers to be released on 29 September do deviate some from expectations, potential market reaction will be muted.It was not so many years ago that traders of both grain and soy futures viewed each of USDA’s quarterly stocks estimates with considerable trepidation. This was because those numbers had somewhat of a history, based on reasonably well-known use factors, of not tracking well with the previous such estimates. This was especially true for corn. Thanks to regular weekly data, private analysts could fairly calculate the volumes of corn exported and consumed by ethanol production during a particular thre...
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
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.