General Comments It was a relatively peaceful trading day today compared to what has gone on the past several trading sessions. This concludes the first full week of the 21-hour trading days, and you certainly don't find much enthusiasm for the changes. The majority of the trading volume continues to take place between the traditional hours of 9:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. CDT. The CME did announce that starting on 12 June the pit trading session will open at 7:20 a.m. on the mornings of key USDA reports. Pit trading will continue to close at 1:15 p.m. There has been some talk that might shift to 2 p.m. when the Globex closes. That would make some sense, but it doesn't seem like that will happen.Markets were "green" all day with the exception o...
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.