Sort & Cull

The live cattle market has been gaining momentum upon strong technical and fundamental interest but, to keep the momentum rolling, the cash cattle market will need to perform in the weeks ahead.

From the Cattle Inventory Report, to monitoring daily processing speeds and the cash market's developments, the cattle market has a lot on the line this week.

Remember to closely analyze the data before you react to a market headline, as Friday's Cattle on Feed report is a perfect example of the need to better understand the report's full context verses its simple headline.

With an aggressive kill schedule throughout the fourth quarter of 2021, market-ready supplies of fat cattle are extremely current for the time being. But it doesn't take the market very long to see supplies back up; we all remember how painful it was to work through...

The last time that the market really got a good test on feeder cattle was the week before Christmas, so amid the excellent rally that the live cattle market is striding out with, feeder cattle prices are expected to heat up as long as the corn market doesn't jump above $6...

Given all the bullish factors that support the live cattle market, I do believe the market stands a strong chance at trading at $140, if not higher, but we must recognize that there is a lot of optimism already built into the contract, and it's never just smooth, easy...

It's hard for the complex to do much trading when every sector of the market is thinly traded during the holidays.

The recent rally that the market has experienced has been a blessing, but now cattlemen hope the market can be defensive during the new two weeks and hopefully protect the market from losing too much of its recent rally while the market breaks for the holidays.

From the tremendous lineup of speakers that the day holds, to the insightful one-on-one conversations that help share awareness of the different strategies that various operations use, there's not a minute to spare and we all have so much to learn.

Corn prices, processing speeds and beef demand will weigh heavily on the success of this market's rally, but as the market sits today, the bull spreaders aren't fearful of the days ahead and anxiously welcome the new year's approach.

These days, it's almost costly to not keep an eye on the horizon and try to be one step ahead of anything that's to come. But in doing so, cattlemen have at times overlooked the importance of the cash cattle market which negatively serves all involved.

The recent announcement that sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has been detected in two humans in Brazil has now led to conversations on whether the U.S. should continue to allow fresh beef imports from Brazil.

Over time, it's not a matter of what's factual or true, what an asset is truly worth or what's it's perceived to be worth, but it's what we feed ourselves mentally that eventually becomes true. And that's why last week's success of trading cash cattle for $130 is such a...

What we may breeze over if not careful is the fact that last week's weighted average of $126.29 posts as a new high for cash cattle trade this year, and that the last time the market successfully traded fat cattle for an average of $125 was back in April of 2019.