No, not Hillary Clinton's secret cattle trading formula, more on that after the jump.
From Texas Monthly, June 2022:
CEO Jim Schwertner credits the persistent success of Capitol Land & Livestock, longtime middleman of the old-school Texas beef business, to a data-driven algorithm.
Barreling forward at 125 miles an hour in his little red helicopter, Jim Schwertner gazes down upon a kaleidoscope of earth tones, patches in a 20,000-acre quilt. The dark khaki of the cornfields plays off the tawny grazing pastures. Both contrast starkly with the gray mazes of the surrounding subdivisions and the white limestone of empty lots nearby that will soon sprout McMansions and mixed-use developments.
Every couple of days, the 71-year-old president and CEO of Capitol Land & Livestock takes to the sky in his Robinson R66 chopper, which he refers to as his “horse.” He scans the Williamson County land, about an hour north of Austin, that’s home to his multimillion-dollar cattle-trading business. He likes to make sure the cattle are getting fed and moved to wherever they need to be, much as his father used to monitor the ranch’s operations from a beat-up old Chevy Suburban.
“Developers come to me almost every day to buy, but I won’t sell,” Jim told me over the helicopter’s intercom one morning in late February, as he circled back over a pasture for a better view of the herd below. Roughly a dozen cowboys were wrangling a hundred head into a double-decker tractor trailer that would deliver them to a feedlot in Amarillo. These cattle had been on Capitol’s land for 45 days, participating in a weaning process the company developed in the late eighties to ease calves along on their journey from mother’s teat to slaughterhouse. Jim says that Capitol weans more than 150,000 calves each year and that its clients pay $2 a head per day for the program, which reduces calf mortality rates from 5 percent down to 2 percent.
At any time, there may be 20,000 head of cattle munching Schwertner-made feed on Schwertner land, being rounded up by Schwertner cowboys, and loaded into Schwertner trucks, but to Jim, the beauty of his business is that the cattle are never really his company’s, at least not for much more than 24 hours. “We’re like day traders on the stock market, but with cattle,” he explains.
Capitol’s team of 25 buyers visits as many as 25 cattle auctions a day in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, buying hundreds of head on the strength of their word. (They don’t deal in written contracts.) All of those cattle are brought to the company’s ranch in the community of Schwertner, which Jim’s great-grandfather Adolf founded around the turn of the twentieth century, after emigrating from Austria.
At Schwertner, the cattle are sorted so that clients can place orders by weight, age, or sex. All are sold the day after Capitol buys them. Some of the six-month-old calves stay for the weaning, but the rest are packed into trailers, which can hold about one hundred each, and delivered to feedlots as far away as California and Washington State. Jim says that Capitol deals in 300,000 to 400,000 head a year, making it one of the largest cattle-trading companies in Texas and the nation.
The business has changed dramatically more than once since Jim’s father, Eugene, founded Capitol, in 1946. Back then, Texas was a predominantly rural state. Now the company’s ranch is surrounded by suburban development. That increasingly encroaching concrete serves as an apt visual metaphor for the threats facing the cattle industry as a whole, including rising land prices, a long-term decline in per capita beef consumption in the U.S. and worldwide, and calls to curb greenhouse gas emissions....
....MUCH MORE
And Hillary:
The former Secretary of State famously ran $1000 to $100,000 in ten months of astounding cattle futures action:
"This is like buying ice skates one day and entering the Olympics a day later," 'says Mark Powers, editor of the Journal of Futures Markets. "She took some extraordinary risks."
She was getting profitable trades allocated to her account in what appeared to be bribes to her husband from larger trades made by her investment counsel who was also outside counsel to Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the largest employer in the state. At the time Bill was Arkansas Attorney-General and was elected Governor a few weeks after Hillary began trading.
And back to the present via FinViz (also on blogroll at right):
After the big up-move from March 2020 things have been a bit trickier for longs.
But for what it's worth the commercial hedgers appear to be covering their shorts.
