If you’re planning on trading sugar, or any commodity market for that matter, it’s essential to have at least a grasp on current supply and demand fundamentals and the news that may effect them. One place to go to if it’s agricultural statistics you seek is, The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The following is a step to getting you to the meat of the USDA website:
1) Start by going to the home page of the USDA (www.usda.gov)
2) Under the “Browse by Subject” tab on the left side of the page, click on the “Agriculture” link.
3) Under the “Related Topics” tab on the right side of the page, click on the “Data and Statistics” link. Here’s the link in case you’re having difficulties http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?navid=DATA_STATISTICS&parentnav=AGRICULTURE&navtype=RT
Whether you’re interested in trading sugar, grains, cotton, coffee, or livestock, you now have access to mountains of agricultural and trade data. Isolating some of the most commonly used statistics is a good place to start.
Once you get to the “Data and Statistics” portion of the USDA’s site you’ll notice a couple of things. On the left and right hand sides of the site you can look around by the topics of interest. If you’re having trouble finding what you’re looking for, these tools might be able to help. Another item you’ll notice is that the data is broken down into three different branches of the USDA: Economic Research Service (ERS), Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), and National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).
A helpful area of the site is the “Production, Supply, and Distribution Online Database (PSDOnline)” link under the FAS sub-category. Here you’ll find global sugar beginning and ending stocks, production, imports/exports supply, and use. Each category is broken down by region and by country. You’ll find this year’s projected numbers along side the last two crop year’s figures. The USDA FAS’ PSD can also be downloaded into excel spreadsheets. This is another useful tool if you want to graph some of these figures out in order to have a visual of the trends.
The PSD database is just a little information to put at your fingertips. Spend some time browsing around the site. There is a lot of information found here. It will benefit you to learn all you can about the sugar markets.
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