The performance of agricultural market advisory services in corn and soybeans

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the performance of market advisory services for the 1995-2003 corn and soybean crops. A new database from the Agricultural Market Advisory Services (AgMAS) Project is used in the evaluation. This database should not be subject to survivorship and hindsight biases. Overall, the results provide little evidence that advisory services as a group outperform market benchmarks, particularly after considering risk. The evidence is more positive versus the farmer benchmarks, even after taking risk into account. Results also suggest that it is difficult to predict the pricing performance of advisory services across crop-years.