Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Grain Markets - Opening Calls June 24th; Mixed calls for commodities!

The grain markets are called mixed this a.m. behind a mixed overnight session and mixed to supportive outside markets.

In the overnight session old crop corn was down 5 cents, new crop corn was up a penny, beans where up 6-8 cents, KC wheat was off a penny, MPLS wheat was down 2, and CBOT wheat was off 6 cents.  At 9:15 outside markets have European wheat off about 1%, crude is up about 2.00 a barrel, the US dollar is weaker with the cash index down 211 at 75.893, and equities are bouncing a little this a.m. with the DOW up 33 points.

Opening calls are in line with the overnight session to a hair firmer on the heals of crude which has gained a little since the grains paused their overnight session.  For the first time in a long time the overnight markets only had about a dime or so range in most of the grains; lately our trading range has been much bigger; a little less volatile markets might make some marketing decisions easier on many.

Basis for the grains continues to be firm; but I have noticed a big increase of product starting to come into our elevators so over the next few weeks it will be interesting to see how basis holds up if supply continues to increase.  It feels like we have good demand but some of the markets have some big basis inverses in them; so if buyers get their needs covered there is plenty of downside risk.

The inverses in flat price are huge for sunflowers, corn, milo, and spring wheat.  Keep in mind that eventually ECON 101 should happen whereas the higher prices curve some demand; be the higher prices basis or flat price.  Bottom line is be cautious of storing grain threw an inverse where you have a high cost of storage; you want to store grain when the market pays you to store grain not when the cost is huge to store it.

We had a crop progress report yesterday; but not many surprises.  Corn planting was 79%, spring wheat 54%, and beans 41%.  All are lagging the average pace; but only spring wheat is massively behind.  Weather should keep some spice and volatility in our markets as we move forward.

When we conference up our broker this a.m. he mentioned some possible index fund rolling taking place.

Please give us a call if there is anything we can do for you.

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