DO AGRICULTURAL MARKET ADVISORY SERVICES BEAT THE MARKET? EVIDENCE FROM THE WHEAT MARKET OVER 1995-1998

The purpose of this report is to address two basic performance questions for market advisory services in wheat: 1) Do market advisory services, on average, outperform an appropriate market benchmark? and 2) Do market advisory services exhibit persistence in their performance from year-to-year? Data on wheat net price received for advisory services, as reported by the AgMAS Project, are available for the 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998 crop years. Not only do market advisory programs in wheat consistently fail to "beat the market," their performance is significantly worse than the market. On average, market advisory service performance is about $14 per acre below benchmark revenue, an economically non-trivial amount by any reasonable standard. The predictability results provide little evidence that future advisory service pricing performance can be predicted from past performance.