General Comments Overnight trade saw more short covering and mostly firmer prices in response to what were seen as unfavorable weather forecasts – no break in the heat until the weekend and limited rain chances. During the day session, grain and soy prices once again traded both sides. The midday weather model added more rain to its outlook for next week, but it limited the coverage to northern and eastern portions of the Corn Belt which would miss some of the driest areas. By today's close, soybeans and corn had diverged with soybeans closing higher except for the September contract. Corn finished down a few cents. The current weather conditions are seen as less threatening for corn than soybeans. Trading volume was down noticea...
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 €...
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.