You may notice a couple of our markets stories about canola on page 15 this week address more sophisticated aspects than our usual reports.
Our Winnipeg reporter, Ed White, has been hitting the books and studying diligently to become more knowledgeable about commodities markets and trading.
He recently completed a couple of courses and is now starting to put his new knowledge to work.
Don’t worry, we’ll still deliver the best basic market coverage possible, including supply and demand reports and forecasts, government policies that impact markets and the weather that affects crops here and around the world. We’ll report what analysts are talking about and what farmers think of that information.
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There will still be the pool return outlooks, livestock reports and everything else familiar to these pages.
But now you will also find more sophisticated information about futures markets, options, technical trading indicators and who is long and short in the market.
The terminology and concepts in these stories might be a little confusing if you are not familiar with the market, but it would be worthwhile to learn a few new things to make your farm’s marketing decisions better informed.
To help with this learning process, White will soon begin a column that will examine and explain some of the common terminology and concepts in the futures markets.
We’ll also, on those occasions when the market falls into a quiet period, produce stories about how to develop a market plan. Marketing livestock and grain is not just about trying to get the highest price. A marketing plan should have several goals, with the key ones producing enough revenue at the right time to meet the bills, maintain the farm’s infrastructure, keep food on the table and build for the future.
A marketing plan should be an integral part of your farm’s business plan and should work to meet that plan’s goals. It should also remove much of the emotion in marketing that presents one of the biggest risks to your operation.
We won’t make recommendations and we won’t tell you when to sell. That is up to you.
But we hope our information will make those decisions a little easier.
