If there was surprise contained in the array of USDA reports released last Friday, it was how unremarkable they were. Analysts (including this one) assumed that within such a variety of data, there must be a few market-moving surprises. However, that was not the case. Pre-report expectations were generally not far off. If the reports were not bullish, they must be bearish, and noncommercials quickly became aggressive sellers. Their blandness allowed traders to refocus on the trade negotiations with China and attempts to avoid a second government shutdown. This is not to say that the reports were boring. One area of particular interest is the U.S. wheat supply and demand outlook and the questions they raised about it. Two of the main questi...
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.