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Managing Today’s Market Risks through Short Dated Options with CME Group

It is no secret that commodity markets have been on fire over the past 12 months.   On today’s podcast we’ve brought on one of our real-life firefighters from RCM Ag – Jody Lawrence along with Tim Andriesen from the CME Group to provide us with some inside baseball knowledge of the current state of the agriculture markets and to discuss the real world application of the use of short dated options to potentially fight the current blaze of volatility surrounding agriculture markets. As the director of Research for RCM Jody is no stranger to the podcast.  Tim, is the Managing ...

AG MARKET UPDATE: JULY 15 – 22

Corn made small gains early in the week only to fall short heading into the weekend as weakness continues to creep into the market with poor exports continuing and weather uncertainty. The hottest temperatures of the year for the plains and western corn belt are expected in the next few days with the only relief possibly coming past the 7 day forecast. As bad as things seem in the western corn belt, the eastern corn belt is having great weather, but will it be enough to offset those loses? Brazil’s crop continues to get smaller, despite the USDA not making ...

AG MARKET UPDATE: JULY 8 – 15

Corn rallied this week following Monday’s USDA report that was relatively neutral. The USDA left expected US yield the same while slightly lowering the 20/21 ending stocks and raising the 2021 production. The USDA did lower Brazil’s corn production numbers, but some estimates still think they are overstating what it will be. The USDA dropped Brazil’s corn production from 98.5 million tons to 93 million, while only raising Argentina’s 1.5 million. The drought conditions persist in the upper Midwest as some areas are expected to get rain over the weekend. The drought in the Canadian prairies and Dakotas does not ...

AG MARKET UPDATE: JULY 1-8

The corn market fell thanks to the rain that was received in the Upper Midwest over the 4th of July weekend. As always when it rains in areas that need it the most, the market freaks out as if it is a crop making/saving rain. The reality is, although the rain was helpful, there are still significant drought conditions across most of the areas that received rain (see in the drought chart at the bottom). With this said, next week is forecasting rain across the western corn belt providing some more relief to those areas before returning to hot and ...

AG MARKET UPDATE: JUNE 18 – JULY 1

The USDA Acreage report was released this week and was bullish for corn. Planted acres came in @ 92.70 million acres, which was below the average estimate of 93.787 million. June 1st stocks were also slightly lower than estimates coming in at 4.112 billion bushels. For the second year in a row the USDA came out with less planted acres than pre-report estimates. There was also a note at the start of the report saying there are still 2.18 million acres intended to be planted during the survey time of May 29-June 17. This means that the 92.70 million number ...