Good Morning!
I hope you’ve been blessed with enough rain to keep hopes for big yields alive. I know as I write this I’m hopeful we’ll get a good rain this evening. In fact…if you look at my weather app as I type this, it says we have a 100% chance of rain…and it’s not raining currently! How does that make any sense? I’ve been around long enough to know you don’t celebrate a rain until you’ve had it…and driven around to make sure all the corn isn’t laying flat! I’m afraid plenty of you have reported that’s happened to you, so I hope we don’t see much more of that. We’re having a great week around my house…with my oldest home. I can’t stress it enough…some of you may get tired of hearing about it, but if you know anything about me at all, it’s that family comes first. Keep me posted if it works. matt@agmarket.net
The corn market looked to continue it’s poor performance of late before coming around due to stronger bean and wheat markets. With China buying corn, beans and wheat, it’s certainly helping prices even as we see a big storm system move through Iowa and Missouri before it (hopefully) impacts Illinois. Given the drop in prices of late, a person has to wonder if we might not see prices fall much more, especially as demand continues to surface. Outside markets were supportive as August crude oil settled up 91 cents at $41.20. This was 6 cents off the high and $1.12 off the low in a quiet trading session. The DOW was up 274 points at 26,765. The Dollar was weak on the day, down .207, closing at 96.
Corn – The corn market has struggle the last few days…and didn’t set the world on fire on Wednesday, but still settled steady to higher. September corn closed a quarter of a penny higher at $3.26 ¼. This was 2 ½ cents off the high and 3 ½ off the low of the day…and 20 cents lower than just a week ago. The EIA report from the Department of Energy was up again…this time for the eleventh week in a row at just under 93.5 million bushels of corn usage. This was right at 40 mb off the marketing-year low. The corn market hasn’t rallied even with strong sales to China announced this week…including the largest Chinese purchase of US corn in history…hopefully we’ll get more purchases and the trade can show some appreciation. While it’s tough to completely write off a rally given the bean crop is far from made, many in and around the trade feel the corn crop is ‘made enough’…if that makes any sense to you. Essentially, we don’t need an enormous crop given we’re carrying in over 2.2 billion bushels of corn into this next marketing year. IF we can rally, for old corn, I’d look to sell rallies and have those offers in place in hopes we’ll get a pop. For the crop you have in the ground, be cautious as to get too far off-balance if you don’t feel good about production. I’d want to feel really good about profit margins paying the bills before selling too many physical bushels…as the relationship between prices and insurance…and PLC etc is the game many of us are going to need to play to make it work this year.
Soybeans – Soybeans haven’t set the world on fire this week but had a nice little day on Wednesday. August beans settled 8 ¼ cents higher at $8.86 ¼. The close was a penny and a quarter off the high and 8 ¾ cents off the low of the day. The bean market still has a chance to take off on a little rally from my vantage point. With the stocks situation much more friendly in beans and the crop needing good weather for the next month, there is plenty of room for excitement. The Chinese are still buying beans…not all from us, but they’re buying beans, so demand remains solid. Most weather models for the 11-16 day forecast have trended warmer and drier over the last couple of days. This could certainly provide buying to come into the bean complex. While I’d always want to take risk off the table if I knew I could make money, for now, I’m going to be patient when it comes to this bean market.
Call me us you want to talk positions or strategy…or simply bend our ear. If you want more information on the markets, be sure to visit my team’s website at https://www.agmarket.net/
Matt Bennett
217-273-1133 – Work
@chief321 – Twitter
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