Wednesday evening we had supper with another family after our kids’ Christmas play. One in our group wasn’t interested in the conversation taking place so she was looking at her phone when she blurted out “President Trump has been impeached!” I then was curious to see how the markets would react on Thursday.

They reacted much like everyone at our table: We all just looked at her then carried on with what we were already talking about.

When things like this happen it can sometimes cause market volatility. This is why you must always be ready. Know what you have in inventory, meaning sex and weight. And know what your cost is. If a different weight of cattle falls out of bed and becomes greatly undervalued sell your overvalued cattle and replace with the undervalued ones. These kind of events can give us some of the easiest trades and profits we could wish for.

But that didn’t happen. In fact I saw market reports from Thursday that were steady to as much as $14 higher.

The best values of gain were between 500 and 800 pounds, so there are still some easy trades to be made there. The values of gain are signaling that the market is urging us to put some weight on in the plains region.

Southern cattle were undervalued compared to the plains markets. The odd thing is that the values of gain were so low in the south. This week the market didn’t value weight gain at all in the south. I know the cost of gain is cheaper down there, but I doubt its cheap enough to put weight on profitably at this point. The good news is the market will change.

 With fats at $1.20 you can replace with some heavy feeder heifers by picking around the edges. You can profitably replace easier with heifers weighing 600 and lighter, and picking around the edges of six-weight and lighter steers. The heifers are the easier, more profitable trade due once again to the big roll-back.

Given where the holidays land the next couple weeks, many auction barns are shutting down until the first full week of January. Very few cattle will move during this time. That is going to cause some huge runs the first couple weeks of January. If you are thinking you’d like to sell some cattle at that time I suggest you get them consigned because these sales will be capped soon, if they aren’t already.

My definition of "value added marketing" is that it is only value added if you capture the added value. This week non-hormone-treated cattle (NHTC) caught a $10-15 dollar premium. That is capturing some good added value. Replacement heifers caught a $4-7 dollar premium. Conventional wisdom says that those replacement heifers have the rest of their lives to pay for themselves. This would also hold true for the NHTC heifers, only the rest of their life will be a shorter period of time. The only reason I bring attention to something so obvious it that this signals that a niche market (for lack of a better term) is perceived as having more value than owning the factory.

Unweaned cattle were $0-12 back, and feeder bulls were $10-20 back. Another thing that is noteworthy is the geographical spreads. And not only the ones between the plains and the south, but within the plains 150 miles changed the price of cattle significantly. Compare that price change to the cost of freight and it paid to put wheels under them.

The opinions of this writer are not necessarily those of Farm Progress/Informa