No One Can Beat the Market

By Fred Evans – June 8, 2017

 

“No one can beat the market.” — Edwin Lefevre

 

Isn’t that a fine statement from a man who enjoyed an 18-year career encouraging people to trade futures?

 

He had a point: There’s evidence that only two in ten people will be successful speculating on the market, and if those two stay in the market long enough they too will lose.

Marketing Lessons Learned From a Pro

By Fred Evans – March 30, 2017

 

A young grain producer and I were recently speaking about marketing and he expressed frustration in his quest to do a good job at pricing his crops.  While he does an excellent job of producing his crops on the 1,000+ acres he farms, he feels out of his league when he ventures into the world of grain marketing at the CME.  I acknowledged his concerns and encouraged him to keep learning as much as he could about marketing, and to practice a degree of patience.

I explained to this producer that achieving a level of comfort and success with marketing often takes years.

Is the commodity broker still relevant? What the evolution of futures trading means for today’s farmer.

By Fred Evans – February 22, 2017 

 

The idea for this blog was hatched following a discussion within our office about an apparent lack of interesting by many young farmers to learn about futures markets and price risk management.

We asked ourselves a few questions:

– Will the next generation of farmers have the same depth of understanding about commodity futures as the outgoing generation?

– Are farmers as willing to hedge grain with futures contracts and use basis contracts now as they were nearly forty years ago?

– How has the industry changed over the years?

– What can we learn from the past?

In this article, we’ll explore these questions through an examination of the evolution of futures trading.

 

Then and now

By Fred Evans – January 17, 2017   

How often have we heard “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” and “the future is a repetition of the past”?  I mention these quotations to highlight the similarities of an event that occurred nearly forty years ago and which now could again be possible.