Good Morning!
I hope all is well around your place. It’s been a busy week around ours. We’ve been planting mostly beans and finished other than our river-bottoms. For corn, we have a couple of days left to go, but didn’t want to plant in front of a big rain we have forecasted over the next couple of days. To be honest, we’re dry…really dry. We could use some moisture, but as we all know…sometimes it’s all or nothing. It’s been interesting farming this spring in that everyone else is still on lockdown mode while we’re out and about. Traffic hasn’t been as busy as normal…which sure is nice when we’re transporting. With many restaurants not open, dinner-time has had to adjust as well. My family is still enjoying the time without practices and meetings, and everyone is more familiar with the Zoom app than what we were before this whole Covid-19 situation. I hope your family has enjoyed the time together as well. I also hope your spring has been as good as mine so far. (knock on wood) Good luck as you get your crops in the ground and please keep us posted. matt@agmarket.net
The corn and bean markets had a good day on Wednesday…especially corn. With talk of more corn exports, the market holding long-term support on Tuesday and obviously oversold conditions, some buying finally came into the corn complex. While beans didn’t fare as well, front-month futures were able to etch out some gains on the day. Given the debacle with the energy markets on Monday, it’s made many a trader skeptical about how to approach any sort of trades. With front-month May crude trading to a negative $40 on Monday…yes, a negative value…it’s thrown the commodity world into a frenzy as far as what should be allowed to happen and what shouldn’t. My personal opinion is it makes no sense to have a physical commodity trade to a negative value. With May off the board now, June is the front month…and settled on Wednesday up $2.52 at $14.09. This was $2.09 off the high and $3.84 off the low. The DOW rallied, settling up 432 points on the day at 23,363. The Dollar continued its surge higher, settling at 100.5, up .13 on the day.
Corn – The corn market had a good day for a change. May corn settled 8 ¼ cents higher at $3.17 ½. This was 2 ¾ cents off the high and 9 ¼ off the low. The EIA report from the Department of Energy was down once again but nowhere near as big of a drop as we’ve seen the last three weeks. We saw a decrease in corn usage of about a million bushels. At just over 55 ½ mb, we continue to see the ethanol industry in contraction. Ethanol stocks are again up by 1% from last week and up 22% from where we were a year ago. This corn market needs several days like we saw Wednesday, but my gut feeling is that may be tough to see. While the market bounced off long-term support on Tuesday after making a multi-year low, we still settled lower…it would have been nice to see a higher close Tuesday as it would have been viewed as a major reversal. My thoughts moving forward are to have a marketing plan in place for what you can live with. I would keep your thoughts reasonable as a significant rally in the face of the demand destruction we’ve seen could be a tall order. Let us know if I can be of assistance.
Soybeans – Soybeans didn’t have as good of a day as corn with front-month beans closing in the black while the deferred months were in the red. May beans settled four cents higher at $8.34 ¾. The close was 4 ¼ cents off the high and 7 ¾ off the low of the day. The bean market settling in the middle to higher end of the range was nice to see, but I was a bit discouraged beans couldn’t post a better day in the face of such a strong day in the corn market. A big reason for beans struggling to build big gains was the continued plummet of the Brazilian Real. It’s amazing just how weak it is and unfortunately makes it tough on US producers who need to see our products selling on the world export market. For beans, I see more of a chance to rally than I do with corn. Hopefully it will come to pass, but as with corn, be cautious as to set your sights too high.
Call us if 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
matt@bennettconsulting.net – E-mail
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