After being blamed in the past for artificially pushing grain prices to very high levels, index funds have pretty much slipped away from public attention these days. However, they are still in business.Commodity price indices are an easy and convenient way to track the general direction of a broad range of commodities. They also facilitate researching the history of price trends for commodities. Typically, a commodity price index will track futures market prices for a group of important commodities from the energy sector, industrial and precious metals as well as agricultural crops and products. Individual commodities are usually given different weights within the index, based on what is seen as their relative importance. Futures market pri...
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.