Call the Market

This past week I took some time off for our annual Big Country Genetics Bull Sale. Aside from listening to the morning news while sipping our coffee until daylight broke, I was completely checked out of the markets to help my husband facilitate this year's sale.

As a producer myself, I know what it feels like to watch second-by-second, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour as the futures complex turns and slips into a bearish, unstable state. But you and I -- we've seen "rodeos" like this before in the futures complex. Whether it was the crisis of the Kansas packing plant fire in 2019, the COVID meltdown in 2020 or the equity market plunge in August 2024, we've seen plenty of dips and dives in this market together.

When market turmoil breaks loose, the single best position to be in is having sold your cattle the day before -- but rarely do any of us get that lucky! Through every market crisis we've weathered together, I think the single most valuable takeaway that's stood true in every season is understanding the power of an asset.

You see, time is what pressures us all. We know it's fleeting, at times it can be costly, and it's one of the market/life variables we cannot control, which is probably why we wrestle with it most. But in situations like the ones listed above where all the oxygen seems to be sucked right from our lungs along with all the hope and opportunity from the marketplace, we cannot afford to forget that our assets remain assets until the moment we sell them. Sometimes our marketing strategy has to change, sometimes we have to pull the plug and take our losses with a short-term asset. But you and I, we are in control of what we do with our asset (our cattle) when the market goes haywire.

While I wish the political dance of tariffs wasn't something we had to juggle right now, as it would be so much easier to fixate our time on all things cattle industry such as beef demand, fed cash cattle prices and phenomenal countryside demand as turnout season nears, that's not the case today.

I can't tell you whether or not the market is going to break below its 100-day moving average today in the spot June live cattle contract. I can't tell you if the spring high has been made yet in the fed cash cattle market. And I can't tell you how much lower traders will push the market before they deem the move has been exhausted enough. But what I can tell you is that most moves are overdone because of emotional knee-jerk reactions in the marketplace, and we never help our own operation or our own bottom-line by making similar emotional decisions. When the market seems to be moving too fast, sometimes it's better to sit back and look at things through a broader 10,000-foot view than to think we'll find a solution in the swirl of chaos.

ShayLe Stewart can be reached at ShayLe.Stewart@dtn.com

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