Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Live-blogging the TP Seminar...

Wow - huge crowd! And remarkably young for a bunch of farmers. Of course that could simply relative to your correspondent. I will pick of some immediate reactions to share in no particular order, real-time.
  • Remember that the link to Top Producer is toproducer.com - not topproducer.com. Weird story there.
  • TP is going to add a special session for young producers next year: Top Producers of Tomorrow. Good idea - let them get it out of their system before us geezers show up.
  • I've been watching way too much BBCAmerica. The first speaker, Ann Duigan, an Irish analyst from Bear Stearns (yes - that Bear Stearns) had a cherming Irish lilt that made think I was in a Bally K episode. She was bullish on ag machinery stocks, although until construction recovers players like Deere are vulnerable. She spoke casually about the expectation of large interest rate drops mid-year.
  • Interesting chart showing the correlation between ag cash receipts and machinery sales. Pretty much lockstep.
  • No matter how strongly you try to emphasize it, some people simply assume the request to turn their cell phone to silent doesn't mean them.
More later.

[Update: This experiment could be labeled a failure, I think. I can barely type coherently when sitting quietly at a desk, let alone during a presentation. Sorry about the poor readability.]

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