Blog Archive

Grains today luffed off bullish fundamental issues, with all of the rain impacting harvest and quality of the corn and beans coming in, and decided, int stead to focus on the rebound in the US Dollar…The commodity funds took their cue and put on their selling hats today, selling thousands of contracts of Corn and Beans and Wheat…

Only once or twice was there a small 5 or 8 cent rally in the beans today, just enough to suck in some bottom pickers before returning to the sell mode…Beans Wheat and Corn all settled lower, with SX down 19 1/2 cents at 986 1/2, CZ […]

The Dow has seen already today a 200 point trading range, with the 10000 level being the top and just a few minutes ago, with DJZ trading down to the 9800 level…Talk of a dollar Short squeeze has fueled this action today, with Crude oil trading around the 78 dollar mark when only last week it was at 82 and change, with people, myself included, looking for 90 dollar a barrel oil just in time for Thanksgiving driving weekend…

It just goes to show that often times people’s opinions are well worth fading in the short term… Longer term, and by longer term I mean […]

Crude Oil is currently getting spanked, trading around the 78 dollar level..I wrote last week that perhaps a 13 dollar rally in 17 days was a little unsustainable… Also I noticed that my friendly neighborhood gas station jacked prices from 266 to 286 just to get ahead of the curve… I wonder if today, they’ll drop it to 266 again, somehow I doubt it…

In any event, the stronger dollar is having an inverse affect on the oil, and indirectly on the grains… Perhaps OPEC better hurry up and have some more secret meetings with China Russia and France about dropping the dollar as the […]

Overnight we posted a high in Nov Beans at 1019 and change…We have since blasted lower all the way down to 984, with the only good support on the charts looking to be the 975 to 972 level…When ten dollars didn’t hold this morning, it started a wave of selling which put the kibosh on every 5 cent to 8 cent rally…For the rest of the day I would look at the ten dollar level as a good sale, because today, the puppeteers want to sell grain. Don’t fight them, because they have all the bullets…Rain and cold weather, and a continued funk in the […]

Continued wet weather will support grains as we go through this week. Technically we had a little pullback last week, but prices still look firm. Today at 10AM we will get export info, and after the close we will get progress report on the harvest. As long as the Bean crop is more than 50 percent harvested, we should be stable, if that number is lower, it should fuel another leg up. On a chart basis, Beans look to be the leader, with delays in harvest also translating to delays in planting next crop of wheat.

With the wet and cold weather, the trade also […]

Rumors abounded today that the Fed may be on the verge of tipping its hand by eventually releasing a plan for what conditions would result in a beginning round of tightening. If we have learned anything from the past, Albeit, the Greenspan years, when the Fed embarks on a tightening mission, it does it incrementally, usually a quarter point at a time on the key fed funds rate…We recently heard some rumblings from Paul Volker, a key inflation hawk, about the eventual need to reign in money supply after the recent flood with basically zero interest rates, along with the incredible amount of TARP money […]

The Dollar/Euro relationship strengthened today, with the Euro hovering around the psychologically important 150 mark. In response to that move, we saw some of the froth taken off of the grains which spurted higher overnight…We saw early pops higher on short covering in the grains, followed by a viscous break lower, with SX alone breaking over 27 cents in about one 5 minute period, followed by a rebound through the afternoon, another sharp break a minute or so before the close, and then short covering during the close with about a 5 cent closing range in the last minute..

Similar volatility was seen in Corn […]

Overnight, we saw grains sharply higher as Chicago land gets pounded by over an inch of rain… We saw corn up 7 1-2 cents, Beans up 15 1/4, and Wheat up 12 cents…The grains still are sensitive to crude prices, but 80 dollars a barrel seems to be holding in the crude, which continues to be supportive…

On the opening in the pits, we opened higher, spiked sharply higher, then had profit taking as SX traded up to 1025, CZ traded up to 413, and WZ went to a high at 573…In the face of those new highs, we saw some sharp selling pressure, with […]

In Chicago, the grains held up under early selling pressure in the Crude, The Corn Closed over 400, over the 200 moving day, Wheat closed over 550, and the Beans settled higher as well at 1005 1/2…All of the grains opened on their lows, and basically ground higher, with the exception of a mid morning blip lower in the Beans.

In the Stock indexes, after being lower early, both the Dow and the S&P500 responded well with better than expected earnings in ATT, Travelers, 3M, and McDonald’s…
As we get to the end of October, again, with no anticipated meltdown, in the face of so […]

Overnight we saw the US Dollar rally, and like physics, every action has an equal and opposite action, in this case, we have the crude, gold, and grains backing off from their strong settlements Wednesday…Typically this is how a bull market looks, new highs, backing off and digestion, and then the rally continues, usually in the face of sometimes bearish news…

Will the Fed step in an defend the dollar with surprise rate hike? The Fed is supposed to be A-political, but certainly a surprise rate cut would most likely cause a flight from equities to some fixed income, although with yields so low, […]