General Comments It has begun to feel as though we have been trapped in a drought-driven market since forever. Of course, that is not true. However, it is instructive to look back at the corn market's recent price history to regain some timing perspective. For this purpose we have chosen CME December corn as the first contract fully representative of the new 2012 U.S. corn crop. Actually, the drought market is not as old as we might think, and the line of demarcation identifying when the corn market was taken over by the drought is quite clear. December corn hit its post-planting low of $5.06 on Friday, 15 June. After a rainless weekend, drought fears infected the corn market beginning the following Monday, 18 June when December corn jum...
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...
As predicted, the Federal Reserve held rates steady at the last meeting before the midterm elections, likely in part because of the election (see WPI 19 October and 22 September). The decision comes at the tail end of a midterm election cycle that has been marked by the two parties campaigning...
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 €...
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.