Good evening!  It was a VERY quiet day today, which gave me plenty of time to write a follow-up essay to yesterday's KRVN post, which shall go down in the annals of history as the "marijuana post".  Love me or hate me, you have to admit that I'm rarely boring!  Click over to www.Barnhardt.biz to read my manifesto on "The Psychology of Failure".

We'll do a brief FUN WITH MATH to keep your mind greased and limber:

Beatrice, NE, YESTERDAY:

SELL 550# top-quality steers @ $115.00
BUY 350# top-quality steers @ $115.50

Okay.  Stop.  This is what we call a no-brainer.  When you can buy back a considerably lighter animal for almost the same price per hundred or less, you're almost always going to be looking at a heckuva deal. 

The return on the gain on this trade is $1.14 per pound.  With an $0.85 cost of gain, a guy would be making $58.00 per head on this trade.  Praise the Lord.

Now, an even more glaring example:

St. Marys, KS, last Tuesday, April 28th:

SELL 565# top-quality steers @ $119.38
BUY 424# top-quality steers @ $116.75

Whoa!  See that?  The four-weight is trading for DOLLARS per hundred LESS than the five-weight.  Finishing out the math . . .

The return on the gain on this trade is $1.27 per pound.  With an $0.85 cost of gain, this trade makes $59.22 per head.  Sweet.

What more can we learn from this?  If we have healthy five-weights in inventory, we should execute this swap immediately.  There is a $50 bill on the table, presenting itself, BEGGING to be put snugly in our pocket.  Why in the WORLD wouldn't we do that?  For most folks, the answer is because the incompetent mainstream marketing paradigm has told them that they make money by putting weight on cattle, and the more weight they put on the better.  This is complete, utter nonsense, and will be the subject of tomorrow's post.