Feeder Cattle Forecasting Models: An Econometric Study of Development and Performance

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether an intricate forecasting model which takes into consideration selling price, cost of gain, and seasonality will perform better at forecasting quarterly feeder cattle prices than a simpler model based only on the futures price of feeder cattle. Although both models exhibited good forecasting ability, econometric calculations demonstrated that the complex model had more accurate forecasting ability than did the futures model. Both models performed similarly in their ability to predict the directional movement of feeder cattle price.