Mark's Market Talk

By the time most of you read this the September USDA grain report will have been released and you now know the answers to all the questions I might have asked in this writing. You will also know who won the big football game they played in Iowa City, so I will leave that alone too. Therefore, I will talk about what little I do know this week. Last week December corn gained 19 cents while November beans were 8 cents lower. Both numbers were helped greatly by the surge higher last Friday as corn was 19 cents higher and beans were 26 higher. Most of this was pushed by world factors that could influence world commodity prices in the coming year. Veg oil prices were strongly lower most of this week which pushed beans lower. Fuel demand is being questioned as Americans are driving less which is affecting ethanol usage. Russia is threatening to close the Black Sea ports as they feel they were hoodwinked on an agreement. They say there were willing to allow shipments of grain to leave the Ukraine since the UN promised that most of the grain was headed to poor countries. However, of the first 40 some ships to leave, only 2 or 3 went to a developing country while the rest went to the UK. Ukraine is already tight on storage space and if the ports are closed there will be a lot of spoiled grain to deal with. Weather continues to demand headlines. The drought areas remain dry while several areas have seen bigtime floods. Most of use are in the dry areas and we are running out of time for rain to help our beans. Mid-August it looked like harvest would start on the early side. Now it looks to be a week or so behind normal. Meanwhile we are all waiting for those early yield results to give us an idea of what to expect. The big push last Friday seemed to come from optimism that this report will be bullish led by a reduced corn yield. However, we have all seen what happens if the trade is back sided by a report. The reaction to that is normally exaggerated and could happen here.