Bitcoin mania with its wild price swings has taken over the attention of a good part of the financial world, and now it has become a commodity. Following approval of the CFTC trading of bitcoin futures, which began last Sunday night at the Cboe, the CME will launch its competing bitcoin futures contract the night of 17 December. For some old-time commodity futures traders, this is like an early Christmas present. Traders accustomed to seeing corn futures prices trade in a 2-4 cent daily range may drool at the potential opportunities to buy and sell highly-leveraged contracts that can move thousands of dollars per unit in a single trade. Moreover, with bitcoin futures barely born, there are not yet algorithms or computer trading programs to...
What You Need to Know Today: After a period of limited activity, USDA reported a sizeable 613 KMT in soybean export sales, including 330 KMT to China and 283 KMT to unknown destinations, potentially also China. The purchases represent a meaningful pickup in demand and bring China closer to ful...
Key Takeaways: Consumer spending is a key driver of the U.S. economy, and the latest retail sales data indicate that spending remains robust despite inflation. In September, total retail and food service sales rose more than 6 percent year-over-year, with food service spending up 7 percent and...
The Trump import plan for 300,000 MT of beef supplies used for ground beef, i.e., lean trim, from September through November has, according to Secretary Brooke Rollins, brought some relief to beef prices. The Executive Order states that the Secretary of Agriculture will analyze and review the m...
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.