It is interesting to see that investors and investment money managers have not totally forgotten about commodities.Historically, most conservative investors looked upon commodity futures markets as nothing more than gambling casinos or worse. Never did they consider placing serious investment money in commodity markets. If they played in commodity markets at all, it was with the same attitude with which they might approach a blackjack table. However, rising demand led by China for commodities as raw materials from the developing world by the late 20th century caused some analysts to wonder if commodities offered long-term prospects for price appreciation. Slowly, various commodity markets began to attract a different kind of participant, on...
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.