The Marketing Style of Advisory Services for Corn and Soybeans in 1995

The 1995 marketing styles for the 25 market advisory service programs included in the AgMAS Project were developed in two steps. The first step was the construction of a detailed "menu" of the tools and strategies used by each of the advisory programs in marketing corn and soybeans. The menu describes the type of pricing tool, frequency of transactions, and magnitude of transactions. The second step was the development of a daily index of the net amount sold by each market advisory program. To construct such an index, the various futures, options, and cash positions recommended for a program on a given day were weighted by the respective position "delta." When the daily values of the index were plotted for the entire marketing period, the marketing "profile" for a program was generated. The results show that advisory programs made a relatively small number of recommendations that primarily involved cash marketing strategies, not futures and options, non-cash marketing recommendations were typically held open for a short period of time, and the pre-harvest amount sold averaged 35 percent for corn and 30 percent for soybeans