We estimate the cost of post-harvest forward contracting corn and soybeans for January and March delivery from 1980 through 2009. For both corn and soybeans we saw a downward trend in the cost of forward contract for January delivery and we conclude that the cost of forward contracting for...

The first decade of the 21st century has perhaps witnessed more structural change in commodity futures markets than all previous decades combined. Not only have trading volumes and open interest increased markedly, but this time period also saw historic changes in both trading and participants....

Numerous empirical studies have investigated the profitability of technical trading rules in a wide variety of markets, and many of them found positive profits. Despite positive evidence about profitability and improvements in testing procedures, skepticism about technical trading profits...

The purpose of this research report is to summarize the pricing performance of professional market advisory services for the 1995-2001 corn and soybean crops. First, advisory programs in corn do not consistently beat market benchmarks, but they do consistently beat the farmer benchmark. Second,...

Theoretical noise trader models suggest that uninformed traders can impact market prices. However, these models' conclusions depend crucially on the assumed specification for noise trader demand. This research seeks to empirically determine the appropriate demand specification for uninformed...

The economic value of public situation and outlook information has long been a subject of debate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the economic value of USDA WASDE reports in corn and soybean markets. The investigation is based on event study analysis, with the "events" consisting of...