General Comments It has been an interesting few days for the CME. First, the ICE's foray into grain and soy markets with all electronic trading for 22 hours a day beginning 14 May forced CME to announce that they too were going to a 22-hour electronic trading day also beginning 14 May. Exchanges can initiate such changes themselves, but CFTC reserves the right to review the decision and change or cancel it if it chooses to do so. Exchanges are required to submit the paperwork for self-initiated changes 10 days before the effective date of the change.In the rush to counter the ICE's move, the CME has not put the paperwork together in time to meet the 10-day requirement, and thus it has been forced to delay the beginning of its 22-hour tra...
What You Need to Know Today: Cattle futures extended their sharp selloff Friday as weakening cash cattle prices, deteriorating feedlot profitability, and reduced packer demand continued to weigh on the market. The inability of futures to sustain a rally following last week's bullish Cattle on...
Key Takeaways: WPI’s new EU rapeseed crushing margin models point to weaker processing returns over the next four months due to higher rapeseed procurement costs and weaker product values. Statistical forecasts call for German crushing margins to decline from €181/MT to €...
Key Takeaways: The tariff burden rose sharply in 2025 and 2026: the effective rate on imports in HTS Chapters 1–24 increased from 1.53 percent in 2024 to 6.11 percent in 2025, before averaging 5.68 percent in January–August 2026. Headline rates tell only part of the story: exemptio...
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.