Mark's Market Talk for January 20, 2024

Jan 20, 2025

We saw a true roller coaster movement in the grain markets last week. We had some big up days and big down days. When the dust settled Friday afternoon corn was 13 cents higher for the week, while beans were up 7 cents. The South American weather forecast did a lot of changing during the week and was partially responsible for some wild swings. Friday Trump posted he had a very good conversation with Chinese leader Xi, and that helped send beans higher during the day. Later today President Trump will be back in charge and there is no doubt that we will not have a lack of news. Tariffs are a very hot button and there is a lot of fear that if the new administration invokes some on China that they will quit buying our grain. However, on the flip side is the thought that China needs our markets as bad, or worse than we need theirs. Hopefully this can all be resolved and we find some stabilization in the markets. Corn appears to have a solid base under it as the demand has been very good. The dry weather in Argentina is helping, but that can change with one rainfall. The world corn stocks are adequate, but not tight enough today to send corn back to 6.00. Meanwhile the world bean stocks are currently more than plentiful.  Brazil has started some early harvest, and they are currently at least a dollar below us on the open market. They have very little storage so they need to move bushels out of the country at whatever price they can get. Therefore, our window of sales opportunity is just about over, China did buy some US cargos of beans last week. They are going into their reserves, and they prefer our beans as they are dryer and store better.