Waiting for Brisket Prices to Fall in January? Think Again

The USDA 455 report, commonly referred to as the 22-90 report is published weekly on Mondays and provides a comprehensive accounting of price and volume of various cuts that have been forward sold for delivery within 22-90 days. This means that all of the volume of meat reported on any given week’s 455 report will fall out of the spot market within a window of 22-90 days, or 3-12 weeks. And with the right forecasting model, this means that when there is a big volume movement, a savvy buyer can use this volume data to adjust their near-term price forecast.

Over the two week period between November 8th and November 21st, roughly 4M lbs of Choice Brisket got sold out front on the USDA 455 report. Based on the 22-90 day delivery window, we entered an ‘opinion’ into the DecisionNext forecasting tool to reflect that 4M lbs of Choice Brisket would fall out of the spot market over the course of the first two months of 2022 at a rate of 500k lbs per week.

Below is a screenshot from the DecisionNext forecasting platform. In this graph, the spot price of briskets is represented by the blue line while the spot volume is represented by the green line. Note the almost perfect inverse relationship between the spot volume and spot price over the past 12+ months.

The updated model bucks the seasonal trend of declining Choice Brisket prices in January/February, instead predicting that the impact of the large order will drive the price of Choice Briskets up by more than fifty cents, from $3.56 to at least $4.11 by January 31st.

Interested in diving into this brisket example? Or is there another item that you are watching and would like to better understand the relationship between volume and price? Happy to set up some time to walk you through the tool.