Yesterday we hosted a live webinar featuring CME Group's Managing Director of Ag Products, Tim Andriesen, and Head of Global Data Sales, David Gresky, as well as Barchart’s Head of Strategy, Keith Petersen, and moderated by Barchart’s Head of Marketing, Colleen Sheeren. This exclusive website gave attendees an in-depth look at cmdty Crop Production and Yield Forecasts and benchmark cmdty Grain Basis and Price Indexes which are now available to consumers in CME Group's DataMine platform. Don’t worry if you weren’t able to attend - we’ll fill you in now!

David Gresky kicked off the webinar with an overview of the DataMine platform, which is CME’s self-service platform that provides access to CME’s historical and third party content. The customer base includes global investment banks, proprietary trading firms, commercial and energy producers, hedge funds and asset managers on the buy side, academics, government, individuals and more. At launch, Datamine had only 5 datasets, but that number has now increased to over 24 datasets! As David explains, CME is focused on adding relevant third party content that helps their customers become more informed on their trading and risk management decisions - the latest of which is Barchart’s Grain Indexes!  

Colleen then passed it over to Keith, who gave an overview of the cmdty by Barchart offering. He took a deep dive into Barchart’s cmdty Grain Indexes, which from county to growing region to state and national level, are the only benchmark for physical grain in North America and are available for basis and price across a twelve-month forward curve. As Keith explains, Production and Yield Forecasts, from cmdty by Barchart, can provide users with information faster than through traditional USDA reports. Keith touched on use cases for this data, but then passed it over to Tim who dove further into the use cases for clients using cash data alongside CME futures markets. Tim explained that financial institutions and traders who are not actually trading physical grain, still need to look at what the cash market is telling them. For example, if basis is starting to drop it’s an indication that the cash market is seeing a lot of movement. If it’s going up in particular areas it’s talking to me about geographic arbitrage opportunities. Smarter traders have to look at this information if they want to be in a good position. 

After diving deeper into specific use cases for the data, Colleen facilitated a great Q&A which included how users can access the data, what delivery methods are available, how to find helpful whitepapers covering the data, information on free trials, and more! We can’t fit everything they covered in one blog post, so be sure to check out the full webinar here.