Craig's Closing Comments

Craig's Closing Comments

Craig's Closing Comments

Craig Haugaard

July ^22nd 2015

In the most simplistic terms the market today was driven by a weather forecast that looks benign. This emboldened the funds to keep selling and caused most potential buyers to wait nervously on the sidelines.

Corn:

Corn seems like it is trying to make a stand after the beating it has received the past week or so.  The funds are still long and trying to maintain that position while producer selling has pretty much dried up so perhaps we can form a base from which to stage a rally.  If we see the funds and speculative longs wave the white flag I suppose we could see December futures retrace all the way back to the $3.80 area.

In terms of reports the only thing that I ran across today was the weekly ethanol report.  Last week we consumed 102.165 million bushels of corn in the production of ethanol and thus need to average 99.715 million bushels per year for the rest of the marketing year to achieve the USDA projection.  We are seeing negative margins at Iowa plants right now so we will have to see how much that impacts ethanol demand moving forward.

Craig's Closing Comments

Craig Haugaard

July ^21st, 2015

Corn:

I want to follow up a little bit on yesterday’s crop conditions report and put a little historical perspective on it.  As we all know, we have very distinct differences between the western Corn Belt and the eastern Corn Belt this year.  While the western Corn Belt looks to have extremely good crops that is not the case out east.  As I reported yesterday, the crop in Illinois is 55% good to excellent.  What I failed to mention is that this makes it the second worst crop for mid-July in the past decade.  The story is much the same in Indiana where we have the second worst rated corn crop in the past thirteen years and in Ohio where the crop is the second worst rated crop in the past eight years.  All of this would seem to argue for a lower national corn yield than the 166.8 bu/acre that the USDA is currently using.  In fact, earlier today private analyst, Dr. Cordonnier, pegged the national average yield at 163 bu/acre.  That seems a touch high to me but if we accept that number and plug it into the most recent USDA Supply and Demand sheet we get the following result:

Closing Comments

Craig's Closing Comments

Craig Haugaard

July 16, 2015

Seventy years ago today the work of the Manhattan Project culminated in the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity Test Site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Craig's Closing Comments

Craig Haugaard

July 15, 2015

Tonight’s comments were composed by Abbey Kittelson, a summer intern from Lake Area Tech.

Reading the news today I started channeling the Doobie Brothers.   As I read the US Coast Guard due to high waters they were closing a 50-mile stretch of the Illinois River, the voices in my head were singing “Old black water, keep on rollin.”

Craig's Closing Comments

Craig Haugaard

July 14, 2015

Just in case it may have slipped your mind, today is Cow Appreciation Day.  If I am not mistaken Cow Appreciation Day was started by Chick-fil-A in a 1995 ad campaign in which cows encouraged consumption of red meat.  Other ag organizations have picked up on it and I believe that Chick-fil-A customers who dress as cows will receive a free meal at Chick-fil-A.  I will be honoring bovines in my own way with a nice ribeye on the grill as I appreciate this magnificent creature.

Closing Comments

Lynn Miller

July 13, 2015

Corn:

Export inspections this morning kept some strength in corn with 1,056,558 reported vs. 938 last week and 925K being the top end of the trade guess.  To end the day we got crop conditions.  The market was looking for these to drop off slightly, but once again we are unchanged at 69% good to excellent.  They continue to see declines in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana while the Dakotas are improving.

Craig’s Closing Comments

Craig Haugaard

July 10, 2015

Corn:

Today was all about the USDA’s July Crop Production and Supply & Demand report.  The old saying is that the early bird gets the worm but that was not the case with today’s report.  As you can see on the following 5 minute bar chart we had a sharp drop in prices right at 11 a.m. when the report came out and the traders read the initial numbers.  Then they got to page 2 and probably thought, “Oh, crap, this isn’t bearish” and started buying.  Of, course this could also all be a figment of my imagination but it was an interesting swing in price in a short time.