Today’s grain and soy futures markets were a sharp contrast to Monday’s with a substantially lower volume of trade. Interestingly, open interest (O/I) in corn jumped almost 40,000 contracts yesterday. Funds were heavy sellers, adding to their already very large short position. However, the big increase in O/I suggests that new long positions were being established, probably by end users who apparently saw yesterday’s break to near last month’s lows as an opportunity. O/I in soybeans also climbed nearly 14,000 contracts as funds added to their short position in that as well. Some of the increased O/I could also be the result of index fund rebalancing, during which some volume of wheat, corn and soybeans was purchased...
What You Need to Know Today: A third U.S. border crossing (Columbus, New Mexico) has reopened to Mexican cattle imports following nearly two years of restrictions related to New World screwworm. The reopening could gradually improve feeder cattle availability, although more than 60 confi...
Yesterday, the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) released a new report of negotiated cash purchases of cattle under the mandatory price report. The report included Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. The goal of the report was to solve the confidentiality issues e...
Key Takeaways: U.S. soybean crushing began in 1911 and saw its most rapid expansion during the 1930s amid the broader agricultural and technology revolutions of the time. After peaking in the early 2000s, the soybean crushing industry went through a downturn as poor crush margins forced...
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.