THE PROTEIN PULSE — DRIVE TIME Closing Bell Friday | November 13th, 2026

HOST: Protein Pulse Drive Time. Closing Bell Friday, November 13th. From The Sparks Group.

SHAWN: Can you hear me now? The cows certainly couldn't. When Microsoft Office went down around the globe on Thursday, corporate protein buyers spent the morning frantically refreshing frozen screens, pacing hallways, and muttering the old Verizon catchphrase into dead headsets: Can you hear me now? Good. With Excel trapped in the cloud and Outlook holding purchase orders hostage, you would think the food supply chain had ground to a halt. Out in the real world, nobody got the memo. In Iowa, hogs didn't pause at the feeder waiting for SharePoint to reboot. In Arkansas, forty thousand broilers didn't skip breakfast because OneDrive was spinning. On Texas feedlots, cattle kept doing what they've done since long before Bill Gates learned to code: eating corn and getting turned into boxed beef. The cloud doesn't farrow, cluck, or graze. Biological reality is the only network with zero downtime. When the digital world goes dark, the physical market keeps rolling—and when Outlook finally loads, it'll be waiting to price your next load.

HOST: Choice grade cutout at three fifty-seven fifty-nine, down two sixty-seven. Pork cutout at sixty-nine fourteen. Fresh nineties at three sixty. West Texas Crude at eighty-eight seventy-four. Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel at four twenty-nine.

SHAWN: Cash-cattle formula buyers should review backup benchmarks when reported negotiated trade becomes thin.

HOST: Protein Pulse Drive Time. Shawn Sparks, The Sparks Group.

SHAWN: Stay disciplined.