Highlights
The commodity market news since Friday's strong finish and now includes a major escalation of the war in Eastern Europe (bullish), China is replacing Turkey as Putin's #1 buddy (bullish because Turkey keeps Ukraine's grain corridor open), less rain than expected in Argentina (bullish), continued poor US corn and wheat exports, (yes, bearish but very old news), the US money supply declined from the previous month for the first time in 33 years (hey, that puts a real hit on inflation; isn't that good for the economy?), Amazon had to borrow $8 billion (wasn't Amazon the Golden Goose?) and everybody in the world who can get near a microphone is predicting a massive world recession with disastrous consequences. Really, there was absolutely no new bearish news for grains. The fear of gloom and doom has caused this sell-off and created buying opportunities.
At 1:55 AM Wednesday, the number of contracts traded in all three March wheat contracts combined was 2,099 contracts. At 6:30 AM, all three March wheat contracts had traded a total of 6,315 contracts. That is nothing! Every commodity trading volume was about 6% of normal volume. That makes the sell-off of the past two days almost meaningless, except for those long grain on the bin or futures.
Much of Russia’s winter wheat crop areas will see temperatures of -10°F (-20 to -25°C) from Friday to Wednesday with no snow. Day time highs have been averaging above freezing since before winter began. About 70% of Russia’s wheat crop is winter wheat and Russia is the world’s leading wheat exporter, by far.