Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

February 02, 2015

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 28, 2015

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 27, 2015

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 26, 2015

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 23, 2015

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 22, 2015

Export sales tomorrow morning.

Corn:

Ethanol numbers were out this morning and they continue to be staggering.  Total bushels ground for ethanol this week was 102.8 million, considerably above the 99.3 needed to meet the USDA’s estimate.  Total stocks were at 20.4 million barrels, up 19.8% from this week last year, this is a negative to the corn market.  Another downside, ethanol margins in Iowa have now gone to a negative $0.40/bushel.

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 21, 2015

Ethanol numbers will be delayed until tomorrow.

Corn:

We continue to trade in this sideways to lower price range in the March corn.  Talk around the globe is not necessarily support at the moment either with rumors of the Ukraine becoming competitive in the export market and crude oil continues to get cheaper putting a crunch on gross ethanol margins.  Not only are falling crude prices hard on ethanol margins but, it’s hitting home in the general economy and since Crude and Corn have a long history of a direct relationship you can expect corn prices to come under pressure.  The oil conundrum is causing grief on a lot of fronts that are all probably weighing on our grain prices.  Off-Shore US drilling rigs are at a 16 month low.  The Permian Basin of Texas and NM shut off 15 rigs last week.  This fall out is starting to hit home.  Schlumberger Ltd is cutting 9,000 jobs and reducing spending 25%, Royal Dutch Shell just cancelled a $6.5 billion project in Qatar and Suncor Energy has let go of workers in Canada.

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 20, 2015

Corn:

Early on in the session the market was getting smacked around by a sharply stronger dollar and weak energy prices.  That coupled with good South American weather had the market backpedaling faster than an ant trying to avoid an elephant stampede.  However, that misfortune was reversed as traders started playing the corn/bean ratio game.  The conventional wisdom is that if this ratio gets too far out of line we will not get enough corn acres and that thought process was credited with creating the buying that pushed this market to a higher close.  For the session the funds were net buyers of 6,500 contracts of corn and are now long 150,400 corn contracts.  If they ever decide to get net short it will be a blood bath.

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Here is the corn activity charted for this past week:

Here is the soybean activity charted for this past week, looks like beans are still trading in a channel:

Market chatter - daily closing comments:

• Corn, Soybeans Close Higher Friday
  • CME Group's corn and soybean markets ended higher.
    At the close, the March corn futures settled 7 cents higher at $3.87 per bushel.
    March soybean futures finished 3/4 of a cent higher at $9.91 3/4.
• Grain Market Chatter Closing Comments 01/14/2015
  • If we are looking for a villain to blame for today’s lower corn price I would like to nominate Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.  The thought of oil prices falling and Saudi Arabia continuing to pump oil coupled with today’s announcement that ethanol stocks were up 7.34% over last week and a whopping 25.82% over last year conjured up visions of slowing demand.
• Grain Market Chatter Closing Comments 01/12/2015
  • The bulls had been hoping that today would show a reduction in corn acres and while we saw a reduction of 300,000 planted acres the harvested acres were left unchanged and that was disappointing.

Craig’s Closing Grain Market Comments

January 14, 2015