General Comments The CME Group has agreed to buy the Kansas City Board of Trade (KCBOT) for $126 million, according to news reports today. The KCBOT wheat futures contract represents hard red winter wheat, the largest class of wheat by volume produced in the United States. However, futures trading volume in the KCBOT HRW contract is far lower than for CME's SRW contract. The CME will now control both the traditional SRW contract and the HRW contract. Presumably, the purchase includes all of KCBOT's assets, including its open outcry trading floor and its interest in the building housing the exchange. As part of the agreement, the CME has agreed to keep open the trading floor for at least six months after closing the purchase.It has been r...
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.