Biology sets the schedule in livestock. A calf placed on feed today is a fed steer in five months, on a timeline no weather report can change. The USDA publishes that pipeline every month — placements, marketings, frozen inventories — and the futures market spends the rest of the time arguing with it. We track the pipeline, the margins, and the positioning.
Explore the Demo → Current cattle signal →Livestock is unique among the markets we cover: its supply is not a guess about weather, it is a count. The USDA reports how many cattle entered feedlots last month and how many left. Cold Storage reports how much beef and pork sits frozen in warehouses. Between those numbers and simple biology, the next several months of supply are largely written down in public documents — which makes it all the more interesting when futures positioning disagrees with them.
The cattle cycle stretches that visibility out to years. Herd liquidation means more beef now and less later; retention means the opposite — and the pivot between the two shows up first in the ratio of heifers on feed and the price of a feeder calf. Where in that cycle are we now? The feeder market, thin and leveraged, tends to answer loudest.
Weather still matters — just differently than in a row-crop market. Heat doesn't kill the crop; it slows weight gain, cuts conception rates, and compresses margins at the feedlot. A brutal stretch of feedlot-belt heat is a supply event with a lag measured in months. That is why our stress index runs every morning, all year: the question is not whether animals are stressed today, but what today's stress does to the marketings table next quarter.
Every SoftSignal market is covered the same way: who holds the positions, what the balance sheet says, what conditions on the ground are doing, and what the cost side implies. For livestock, each layer looks like this.
The beef pipeline is a conveyor with a known speed. Each stage is priced by a different market, and each USDA release reads a different point on the belt.
Calves raised on pasture. Drought here — grazing-state conditions — decides how many move early and how many heifers are kept back.
Weaned calves grow on grass or wheat pasture until heavy enough to place. This is the animal the Feeder Cattle contract prices.
Placements in, marketings out — the monthly Cattle on Feed report reads this stage directly. Feed margins and heat stress do their work here.
Fed cattle sell to packers — the Live Cattle contract's animal — and product accumulates in the freezer, which Cold Storage counts monthly.
Hogs run the same logic on a faster belt: farrow-to-finish takes roughly six months, so the hog supply pipeline turns over about twice as fast — and positioning extremes tend to resolve faster with it.
The stress index itself runs every day of the year — apparent temperature (heat index and wind chill) rather than raw temperature, because that is what animal performance actually responds to.
On the monthly clock: Cattle on Feed and Cold Storage land around the 20th–22nd and are folded into the next weekly edition. The WASDE livestock supplement tracks the meat-supply side of each monthly USDA release.
The core read: full COT chart sets for all three contracts, Cattle on Feed and Cold Storage context, feed margins, drought, and the daily stress index in one weekly document.
See it in the demo →Cattle, hog, and poultry supply and demand from each monthly WASDE — production, trade, and per-capita disappearance, visualized.
See it in the demo →The public one-page read: managed-money regime, week-over-week change, and stress signals — updated after every CFTC release, with an RSS feed.
Current cattle signal →The same one-page treatment for the hog market — the faster-cycling mirror to the cattle complex.
Current hogs signal →The full report — positioning chart sets, pipeline reads, feed margins, and the daily stress index — is in the open demo. No email, no card.