Mark's Market Talk

After several weeks of higher closes, the grain markets hit a brick wall last Friday as mild liquidation earlier in the week turned to massive liquidation on Friday. For the week March corn was down 31 cents while March beans were down 1.07. So, what happened? Our exports were strong last week, there were new sales announced again Friday, but the bottom still fell out. The South America weather has turned non-threatening and mid-day Friday there was a news story out of China that a new strain of AFS had been detected in a new 1000 sow unit. However, the story also said they suspected a vaccine had caused this, so there may be more to this story to come. Barring a widespread disease outbreak from this, the fundamentals remain decent. We still have the cheapest and largest supply of corn in the world. And there will not be any major competition for 4 months. On the bean side we are still projected to bring the carryout down to a level that will cause spot shortages here and there and may force us to import as much as 35 million bushels before next fall’s harvest. Last week’s correction was somewhat overdue and hopefully overdone. There have been funds riding this bean market for 5.00 and some decided it was time to exit. Normally when this happens it also takes a bunch of poor guys that bought in late and cannot afford to hold on. Chart watchers will tell us we may still have some down days left before we can start back up again. I would like to say it was a no brainer that we will retrace what we lost last week. However, nothing is certain in grain marketing other than this will be a new week and the markets will move. We just do not know which direction.