The purpose of this paper is to address two basic performance questions for market advisory services: 1) Do market advisory services, on average, outperform an appropriate market benchmark? and 2) Do market advisory services exhibit persistence in their performance from year-to-year? Data on corn and soybean net price received for advisory services, as reported by the AgMAS Project, are available for the 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998 crop years. Performance test results suggest that, on average, market advisory services exhibit a small ability to “beat the market” for the 1995 through 1998 corn and soybean crops. It is debatable whether the performance of advisory services also is economically significant. The predictability results provide little evidence that future advisory service pricing performance can be predicted from past performance.
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