Monument Circle Acquisition Corp (MON)

[Democritus_of_Abdera]

Re Statistical Measures....

I agree with your view that MON has conducted extensive statistical analysis with regard to which seed variety to plant in which local and has reasons not to disclose company specific data.... I’m addressing comparisons made for marketing reasons... e.g. a direct comparison of Pioneer Hi-Bred corn yield to that of Monsanto corn in a specific market.

I believe that Monsanto will fail to convince farmers that their yield advantage is more important than price unless they can convince them that their yield advantage is real (in the face of counter claims by competitors). Currently, they are asking farmers to judge the significance of the data based upon the size of the study (as detailed in the quote from the Investor Day Q&A below). I think that they would be more convincing if they asked farmers to judge the significance based upon statistical measures.

<Q – John Roberts>: Thanks. John Roberts, Buckingham Research. Question for Ted. Ted, your chart on the plot yield distribution, and you pointed out that competitors can use that data to show something is better than others. Do you think consultants out there that try to do independent work can get enough apples-to-apples data to do good comparisons, or really it’s only the companies themselves that have enough data to bake these kind of yield comparisons?
<A – Ted Crosbie>: It’s a good question, and the answer is that it depends on how many locations they have, and whatever comparison they’re making. So if it’s variety A versus variety B, if they have a minimum of 30 locations so that head-to-head comparison is probably a good comparison, or a valid comparison, assuming the experimental precision in the 30 locations is good. So first trials, if you average enough locations across enough area, you’ll end up with enough locations. So it’s really about the number of locations and are they valid trials and not necessarily who did it.
<A – Hugh Grant>: But it’s fair to say you need a minimum of 30, and you would feel a lot more comfortable with more than that?
<A – Ted Crosbie>: Oh, yes. I mean -
<Q – John Roberts>: That’s kind of basically --
<A – Ted Crosbie>: In our Group, our company, we want to be able to slice and dice the data any way we want to. And we really want to look at hundreds if not thousands of reps in those head-to-head comparisons. All I’m saying is that when you’re looking at independent non-Monsanto data, make sure you have at least 30, but we would want hundreds and thousands.