Mark's Market Talk

The bean market continued its downward spiral last week as May beans were 48 cents lower while the November contract finished the week 40 cents lower. On Friday the board did put some back on as May was 11 higher and Dec 8 higher. Was it just a bounce or the start of a correction? It will take more trading days to figure this out, but we may see a 50 percent retreat in the near future as markets tend to overreact and the bean market has done that the past 3 weeks. The Brazilian harvest is over half done and currently they have beans priced as much as 1.25 below the US. Late last week it was rumored that 3 cargos of Brazilian beans are headed to our SE coast. We have heard this story before, and though we can’t totally ignore this, it normally does not happen when domestic supplies are available. Meanwhile corn had a better week as the May contract was 9 cents higher and December gained a penny. The funds have gone from being long 160,000 contracts to being more than 40,000 short in about a 3-week period. Yet the market did not totally collapse. A spark of some type could easily send this market back higher in a short order. That spark may come from the USDA perspective planting report out later this week. The weather in Brazil is turning hotter and dryer which will not help their late planted second crop corn. The expected corn planting in Ukraine has been lowered as their farmers are fighting high input costs and are looking at crops that take less money to raise. The chance of prevented plant acres in the northern plans is starting to gain traction as they continue to receive snow and cold weather. December futures have been very slow to respond to any of these possibilities. We finally closed right above 5.60 Friday which is a move in the right direction, but it will be a slow climb back to 6.00. We will know a lot more at the end of this week after the USDA reports. Once they are released, we will start trading weather and the odds of getting everything planted.