Mark's Market Talk for January 2, 2024

Normally there is something that catches my eye each week and I enjoy sharing it. This past week has been truly a holiday week with very little commodity news or actions. The big draw right now seems to be the stock market as it has seen record closes for the past 2 weeks. Some of that money would usually end up in the commodity markets which would help us propel higher. However, the only new news out there is the same old news we have been hashing for weeks. South American weather, the war in Ukraine, the war in the middle east, and the changing tax polices in Argentina. So, we struggled again last week as corn closed 2 cents lower while beans dropped 8 cents. Fortunately, we had a couple of good days to offset the losses we had the other 2 days. 3-day weekends are great for the American workers, but they are terrible for commodity traders. Too much can happen in that extra day and more times than not it tends to be bad, so a lot of traders want to go home on Friday afternoon in a safe position. So, we will all hope we will come into the new year with some positives news that will stimulate the markets. The funds are about 178,000 short corn and only 5,000 long the bean market. Therefore, if some good things start happening we good see good movement quickly. Every year we all hope for something better than the year previous, this year it may take a lot of work to accomplish this.