General Comments Markets were basically steady during much of the overnight trading hours with soybeans trading back and forth while corn and wheat were generally slightly lower. The closer we got to daylight, however, the weaker the markets got. By midmorning soybeans were down 17-18 cents, corn was down 10-12 cents and wheat was down double-digits in Chicago with smaller losses in KC and Mpls. Part of the selling was blamed on more "fiscal cliff" worries, but that didn't make sense with financial markets and crude oil slightly higher and the dollar slightly lower. People were not taking money off the table in those markets.The more plausible reason for the selling was that traders were taking some money off the table ahead of tomorro...
What You Need to Know Today: U.S. weather is getting more attention this week as conditions vary greatly across the western, central, and eastern corn belts, with the different regions battling dryness and too much rain simultaneously. The ProFarmer Crop Tour began today in Indiana and Nebrask...
Key Takeaways: Argentina is on pace for a record corn crop and record exports in the current marketing year, with abundant supplies likely to keep the country highly competitive in global export markets. Argentina’s record exportable surplus is allowing it to offer highly competitive pri...
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.