Introduction

In this lesson, you'll begin connecting the dots to analyze the agricultural products market. First, I will illustrate some of the available free resources that a market analyst can use to find useful information and data to analyze the market for a specific commodity. Second, I will focus on simple, univariate and bivariate statistics in an attempt to characterize the distribution of data series that can be downloaded from publicly available sources. I will also emphasize the usefulness of simple graphical analysis tools, including scree plots, line carts, and histograms, in order for you to learn about data behavior. After this lesson, you will understand how a properly made graph enables you to say a lot about a data series, because as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Learning Objectives

At completing this lesson, you should be able to

• find relevant data sources from publicly available resources for the analysis of agricultural markets;
• retrieve, import, and manipulate acquired data into Microsoft Excel; and
• use univariate and graphical analyses to perform preliminary data analyses.

Lesson Readings & Activities

By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in the Lesson 2 Course Schedule.