Elaine Kub's book on marketing: "Mastering the Grain Markets: How Profits are Really Made". Pretty basic. A quick, somewhat entertaining read, if you can sit through it in a short time period (I had to take a break and do something else for a while) My dad also got me a book "The Art of Grain Merchandising". A bit dry. Informative. Take a long time to read. Some guy in the upper Midwest has a book - something about 'Marketing isn't hard, isn't just not easy' Haven't read that one yet. I have tried to become a more disciplined decision maker in the last 5 years and, for me, removing emotion from marketing is about: (1) writing down your plan. Over and over again - people who write down their goals, achieve them. People who don't shift the goalposts. (2) knowing your cost/bushel (reasonable estimates based on records, projections, and APH's) (3) making disciplined sales based on those costs and jpartner's market structure comments (selling towards the top of a range) - selling 50-80% of your crop ahead at profitable prices, when the future is unknown, because singles and double score runs and home run swings (waiting for Hail Mary prices) mostly end if flyouts. Once you become more comfortable, taking manageable storage risks waiting for those targets to hit. (4) separating futures and basis parts of the sales transactions (still working on this one - it's hard to be that disciplined, but seems rewarding - a lot of marketing books talk a lot about understanding the basis game) (5) celebrating successes (profits) harder than perceived losses (perceived lost revenue for not selling at the 'top' of the market - a cognitive tricky way to beat yourself up). This one isn't hard, but it's easy to backslide. If you sold at $9.25 remember a lot of guys sold at $8.40 or $8.60. Not a lot of guys sold at $11, no matter what you hear. |