I have had bird feeders close to the house for 35 years. The bear tore them down a couple of times a few years ago, and we had to stop feeding for a month. Other than that we have always fed a herd of a few hundred “livestock” as I call them. Regular customers Most [...]
Two old axioms of the grain trade cropped up in conversations last week. One is that a big crop keeps getting bigger. The other is that the cure for low prices is low prices.
We can’t go back to the markets of 2008.
Many questions remain as we approach the end of the crop year. Not the least of these is: What size crop do we have?
USDA will release the Supply and Demand Report Wednesday, and, as usual, it represents an untimely truth for this grain market columnist. I write this on Monday before the market opens, and the reader gets this Thursday, after the report and after some market reaction to it. The numbers Monday, the markets were sharply mixed, [...]
For the first time in a long time, corn has had days as the leading grain on the Chicago Board of Trade. That is to say, some days the gains in corn were more than the gains in wheat or soybeans. Some days, the beans matched the corn, but with a higher-priced commodity where the [...]
Tuesday’s market (June 30), we’re in a “hat rack” market — we’re looking look for some kind of market news to “hang our hat on.”
Prices have broken sharply on the Chicago Board of Trade the last few days. The perception of a good crop and outside markets continue to ravage what was a welcome rally. Monday trading was an example of how bad it gets when the speculators run out on the market. Soybeans were down 27 1/2 cents [...]
Corn, beans and wheat have made new recent highs on the Chicago Board of Trade this week, but there is no surprise. Price discovery The same factors that have pushed prices the last month continue to effect the ideas in Chicago of price discovery. Price discovery is the term the grain trade uses for finding [...]
Now is the spring of our discontent. Now, we are starting to talk about how dry it has gotten. Now, we are wishing we had not poked seed into mud that might crust over it.
