General Comments U.S. equity markets have been fixated all week with the Facebook IPO that took place this morning. It was huge success with the highest ever retail demand for the stock. More than 82 million shares traded in the first 30 seconds, another tribute to the powers of electronic trading, but that wasn't enough to stimulate gains in the U.S. or world financial markets. They were all net losers for the day and certainly for the week. Crude oil also continued its losing ways. The dollar was just slightly weaker.Wheat and corn markets were again super strong today while the soy complex was under selling pressure most of the session. Wheat and corn were all about weather. The soy complex seemed more concerned about how China's auct...
Key Takeaways: President Trump announced $8 billion in additional agricultural assistance through the Harvest Fuel Relief Program, as USDA projects farm fuel and oil expenses will increase 28.8 percent in 2026. The package follows $12 billion in earlier relief, while government farm payments w...
Key Takeaways: A student group from the University of Chicago is protesting to bring back onion futures trading. Trading in onion futures was banned in 1958 following a spectacular bout of market manipulation that resulted in a corner of the physical market. The ban on onion futures led t...
Beef packer margins deteriorated to $141/head last week, down $55 from the prior week as fed cattle prices strengthened while the Choice cutout remained nearly unchanged. The cutout held near $373/cwt while fed cattle prices climbed $4/cwt to $224/cwt, narrowing processor profits. Despite the d...
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.