Buying cheap and selling dear, with the lorry included
The arbitrage spread call finds the gap between markets for the same product and then does the part most spread calculations skip: it checks whether the gap survives the cost of getting there. A wide gap between 2 markets at opposite ends of the country is not an opportunity, it is a freight bill. The answer reports the gap and the distance together, so the second half of the question is never left implied.
How a price travels
Price transmission is the question of what a move in the reference market means for a market 2 counties away, and when. The answer gives a lag in days and a strength, both measured against the historical record rather than assumed. Some markets follow closely within a day. Others take weeks, and a few barely follow at all, which usually means different ground supplies them.
Note what this is not. A lag that held for 3 years is a description of the past, and reading it as a prediction of next month is the mistake it most invites. The figures behind this call, including a worked example, sit on the price intelligence page.
County inflation
This ranks counties by how fast a basket of staples is getting more expensive. It is the call behind a question a programme officer asks in a different form: where is the cost of eating rising fastest right now.
Harvest reliability
This call predicts no yield. It describes how dependable a county’s harvest has been: the spread across recorded seasons and which specific years failed. A lender pricing risk over a district gets more from that than from a single-number projection, and it has the advantage of being checkable.
Season onset
Has the season started here, is it early or late against the usual, and is the rain that would start one on the way. The first 2 parts are measured from the rainfall record. The third is an outlook, it is labelled as one in the reply, and it carries its own attribution.
Coffee and tea
2 calls are specific to the auction floor. One reports what a given coffee grade earns over the market as a whole, which is the premium a washing station captures at auction. The other places a tea factory against its neighbours and says whether it is beating them. Both read auction records, and neither attributes the difference to a cause.