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Corn continued it's hot run this month with a great week in both old crop and new crop prices. As Brazil’s safrinha crop keeps facing a dry outlook, pressure is mounting on the US to produce a great crop to fulfill world demand. The US forecast is turning wetter for many major growing areas but remains cool for this time of year. The cool weather is not ideal for early growth, but the rain will be welcome in areas facing drought conditions (see map at bottom). There is a rumor of more Chinese interest in new crop which helped propel ...

Volatility was the name of the game this week as many days saw wide trading ranges on both sides of unchanged. Looking at the chart below you can just how wide ranges the last few days have been.  Despite the volatlity, the May contract settled squarely within the range as of Thursday.  This volatility came about as we’ve faced a short squeeze on the front month May contract.  Coming into the week, there were nearly 200,000 open contracts, as of this morning there are only 12,500 – presumably many were on the short side and needed to cover. Regardless of ...

Off to the races? Corn was limit up Thursday as prices for May corn topped $6.50 for the first time since 2013 continuing its impressive weekly run. The May option expiration occurring Friday has traders scrambling to cover short call option positions by buying futures and positioning themselves for next week’s first notice day. As we have been seeing in the cash market for a while with improving basis, it seems the futures market is catching up and realizing the market needs corn and it needs it now. Any farmers with old crop remaining has the cards in their hands ...

If you haven’t been watching one of the more esoteric futures market lately – Lumber – you’ve been missing a rather  parabolic up market – up nearly 9% last week, 27% for the month,  78% for the year, and 280% over the past 12 months. Move aside dogecoin! So how does a $300 commodity that regularly deals with  events such as wildfires and sharply higher housing starts now come to be trading at almost $1300? To answer that question, we checked in with our lumber expert Brian Leonard to get the inside scoop: Unlike most other commodities, lumber is used ...

Corn had a good week as we reach new contract highs in May for old crop. As you can see in the 1 year chart below after trading in the $5.30-$5.60 range for a couple months corn has seen a strong response since the Projected Plantings report came out. The export numbers this week were not great, yet corn was still able to post a positive day following the report as the number was still 10 million bushels above the weekly total needed to meet USDA estimates. Analysts are expecting Brazil’s safrinha crop to potentially lose 5 million metric tonnes ...