THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL MARKET ADVISORY SERVICES IN CORN AND SOYBEANS

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of market advisory services for the 1995-2000 corn and soybean crops. A new database from the Agricultural Market Advisory Services (AgMAS) Project is used in the evaluation. This database should not be subject to survivorship and hindsight biases. Overall, the results provide limited evidence that advisory programs as a group outperform market benchmarks, particularly after considering risk. In contrast, some evidence exists that advisory programs as a group outperform the farmer benchmark, even after taking risk into account. There is little evidence that advisory programs with superior performance can be usefully selected based on past performance.