AUSTRALIA’S first online sales version of the benchmark cattle market monitor, the Eastern Young Cattle Indicator (EYCI), is now up and running.
Prominent market analysts Mecardo have created the Online Young Cattle Indicator (OYCI) in response to the growth in online livestock auctions.
Market analyst and wool and livestock trading manager Matt Dalgleish said the online platform for livestock selling was growing on the back of many advantages, including biosecurity and improved animal welfare.
“If you total up all the online platforms, the volumes being put through equate to the biggest saleyard in the country,” he said.
“As that growth continues, it makes an indicator like the OYCI very relevant.”
The price movement in the OYCI broadly mirrors the EYCI, albeit with slightly more volatility on a week-to-week basis, according to Mecardo.
Mr Dalgleish said the spread between OCYI and ECYI since March showed an increase in the premium achieved online.
Potentially, the online platform was attracting a better quality of stock, given its appeal to larger scale, highly professional producers with larger lines to offer, he said.
Mecardo utilises various online auction sources and its own extensive database of cattle prices and uses only online sales of the same types of cattle from similar areas across the nation that are used when creating the EYCI.
The aim is to keep premium subscribers updated on the fluctuations of the OYCI and its performance against the EYCI on a regular basis.
The EYCI, reported on a daily basis by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), is a seven-day weighted average indicator that is calculated from the sales of vealer and yearling heifers and steers, C muscle, 2 or 3 fat score, 200 kilograms liveweight or greater, from 26 saleyards across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
“Using a filtering and weighting process applied to the online sales data within the Mecardo database we have been able to create a comparative online EYCI, or the OYCI, by focusing in on the sales of the same type of cattle from regions near the 26 East Coast saleyards, making sure to exclude online cattle sales from premium breeds, such as Wagyu, and high value breeding stock where possible that are not generally captured as part of the EYCI via the saleyard process,” a Mercardo article on the OYCI said.
“We now have capacity to undertake this type of analysis across other classifications of cattle as well,” Mr Dalgleish said.
“We will look to publish on a weekly basis, regularly visit it as a topic and delve more into data sets for analysis pieces.”