UNDER CONSTRUCTION
“The Move” concept is used to quantify marketing performance by farmers, analysts, the CWB, etc. It is a percentage calculation based upon how much of “the move” of the market that any of these Marketers captured in the marketing year – factoring in “cost of carry” for sales made into delivery periods after the initial harvest month. The move is simply the high of the market minus the low. That move of the market sets the boundaries for how high and how low you could have marketed.
i.e.: selling 27c Lentils in a year the high was 29c sounds impressive - being just 2c off the high - but if the low was 26c, you only captured 1c of the 3c move thus marketed just 33% of "the move". If you waited 6 months after harvest to catch that 27c bid, you did worse that that due to the cost of carry associated with holding through harvest.
The average farmer markets below 40%, the CWB probably never hit 50%, and no one consistently hits 70% – professional market analysts included. The inaugural J-MAS goal in the 2008/9 marketing campaign was 50% (a level 12% greater than customer’s averaged before joining J-MAS. That 12% of an average crop move of $3.75/bush is 45c/bushel making nearly $14/acre to the farmer on a 30 bushel crop) and we hit that target exactly.
In 2009/10 with a year under our belt we targeted 60% and we averaged 64% – a net gain of over $29/acre to the farmer.
With the 2010/11 marketing campaign wrapping up, we are poised to come in around 65% for 2010/11 with a 3 year average of 60%, exactly at our expectation level (based on the 2005-2008 back-testing of the J-MAS rule based marketing system) previous to our launch in 2008. Coupling the returns here with those of the “Rotation Rater”, we believe strongly that we are adding upwards of $35/acre/year to our customers.
Plenty of theory and math involved so we’ll post more concrete numbers here once we have the site fully up and running.
