World Perspectives
equities

News Impacts on Commodity Volatility

Researchers from Northwestern, Stanford, and the University of Chicago tracked equity market volatility with articles from eleven different newspapers, and they unsurprisingly found that trade policy had no impact on the market prior to the election of Donald Trump (see NBER Working Paper No. 25720). In fact, the researchers’ Equity Volatility Index tracker indicated that news about government policy in general has become more greatly correlated with market volatility since 2017-18. Yet using this same theory and applying it to agricultural commodity futures prices was not as conclusive. As would be expected, commodity prices rose the day that the USMCA was signed and fell the day that President Trump announced higher duties on impor...

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From WPI Consulting

Illuminating the value of technical research

On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.

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