Live Cattle / LIV.CATL

Live cattle (CME). A multi-decade-low US herd keeps the beef complex historically tight. At the latest reading, Live Cattle prints a spot of 212c/lb — a move of ▲0.40% over the past twenty-four hours and ▲4.10% across the trailing thirty days.

The v3.2 stress index places LIV.CATL at 0.60 — a watch reading on a composite that blends price momentum, inventory cover, supplier concentration and geopolitical exposure. The metric is recomputed on every ingestion cycle, and the weekly delta is the line worth tracking rather than the absolute level.

For operators, the question is not the spot itself but the buffer behind it. A tightening reading on Live Cattle compounds with any incident on a shared transit route or producer, and the cascade is rarely linear. The scenarios below carry LIV.CATL as an explicit input — each one is wargamed and reviewed against this commodity's exposure profile.