The CBOT was mostly red on Monday with traders seeing little reason to buy the soy complex after a benign and semi-bearish Grain Stocks and acreage reports for soybeans. Further, they saw little reason to keep buying corn and wheat amid large on-farm stocks and amply supplied global balance sheets for 2024. The day’s trade seemed to feature resignation to the bearish outlook for soybeans with a more tempered outlook for grains following Thursday’s bullish surprise. The livestock markets, however, were far from calm with the lean hog market jumping to new contract highs while cattle futures collapsed on news of highly pathogenic avian influent (HPAI) in Michigan and Idaho dairy farms. One of the biggest news items on Monda...
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.