Without news to explain the sudden turn, shorts may at first misjudge the turn as being merely a rally
Reading Time: 3 minutes Soybean prices have continued to trade in a sideways to slightly higher trading range since November 2012. Support is down at $14 and resistance up at $15.30. This $1.30 trading range is indicative of a market in equilibrium for the past seven months, with few buyers willing to pay more than $15.30 and most sellers […] Read moreBear trap catches the shorts in soybeans looking the wrong way
Prairie flax cash market comes down from recent highs
Reading Time: 2 minutes The western Canadian flax cash market seems to be coming down from recent highs. Fresh demand from China and Europe helped values rally recently, but the market in Europe has levelled off and Canadian cash prices seem to be following along. Chuck Penner, president of LeftField Commodity Research in Winnipeg, said he’s not sure if […] Read more
Statistics Canada stocks report quickly digested, ignored
A common refrain from many analysts was that StatsCan was underestimating the size of last year’s crop
Reading Time: 2 minutes ICE Futures Canada canola contracts moved lower during the week ended May 3, with fund traders liquidating long positions behind much of the weakness. Overall losses in canola came despite a firmer tone in the U.S. soy complex. The unwinding of spreads between the two markets was thought to be behind some of the relative […] Read morePrice bubbles and commodity markets
Reading Time: 2 minutes Athoughtful new paper from researchers at the University of Illinois marks a significant step forward in research on how commodity futures prices are formed. Until recently, the academic and policy debate about futures price formation has been locked in an acrimonious and polarized standoff between market fundamentalists, who insist all price moves reflect supply-and-demand fundamentals, […] Read more
New-crop concerns loom large over old-crop canola
Reading Time: 2 minutes ICE Futures Canada canola contracts moved higher during the week ended April 19, with the largest gains coming in the old-crop months. Those gains nearby may be tied to the tightening supplies in Western Canada, but have as much to do with new-crop perceptions as anything else. Nobody is writing the crop off just yet, […] Read more
USDA official sees 2013-14 global wheat crop around record levels
Reading Time: < 1 minute Global wheat output could climb to record highs in the year to June 2014 on improved crop prospects for some key producers hit by severe droughts last year, an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said. “I think global production should get back to record level,” Joe Glauber, the USDA’s chief economist, told […] Read more
Agricultural fund suspended after criticism
Reading Time: < 1 minute BNP Paribas, France’s No. 1 listed bank, has suspended a 160-million-euro ($214-million) agricultural commodities fund after international aid group Oxfam criticized French banks for speculating on food prices. “We are suspending subscriptions,” a spokeswoman for BNP said of its Parvest World Agriculture fund, explaining the move as part of the bank’s policy on corporate and […] Read more
AAFC sees more wheat, less canola planted
Reading Time: < 1 minute Canadian farmers will plant more wheat and a bit less canola in 2013, Canada’s Agriculture Department said in its latest planting forecast, which offered a slightly reduced wheat- planting estimate from the previous month. Attractive prices and a modest shift away from canola and other crops should entice farmers into planting more wheat, according to […] Read more
U.S. corn plantings seen at highest since 1936
Reading Time: 2 minutes U.S. farmers may plant 97.43 million acres of corn this year, up 0.3 per cent from last year, which would be the largest corn area since 1936, according to a Farm Futures Magazine survey. The survey of 1,750 U.S. growers also showed farmers intend to plant a record 79.09 million acres of soybeans, up 2.5 […] Read more
CME pares back grain trading hours
Reading Time: < 1 minute CME Group Inc. said March 5 that it plans to pare its nearly non-stop trading cycle for grains and oilseeds to 17-1/2 hours per session after traders complained a move to extend activity had hurt liquidity. CME, owner of the Chicago Board of Trade, sought to shorten the trading day less than a year after […] Read more
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