General Comments After the Monday holiday, the first trading of the week opened last night with wheat, corn and soybeans prices moving higher. There seemed to be a number of factors involved: follow-through technical strength, forecasts for continued dryness in Argentina and southern Brazil, no relief from the drought over the U.S. Southern and Central Plains and the western Midwest, reports that Chinese buyers were actively seeking U.S. and Brazilian soybeans for spot shipment through May, and signs that Russia might consider eliminating its 5 percent import duty on grains.Those sentiments carried over to the opening of the day session helped along by big weekly export inspections for soybeans and wheat. CME wheat jumped up 7 cents and...
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.