2/16/2023

Thursday's trade was featureless and, overall, extremely quiet for corn and soybeans.  Ranges were relatively tight and we spenting most of the day bouncing back and forth between 1-2 cents higher or lower throughout the session.  Following yesterday morning's announcement, the USDA confirmed another export sale this morning.  This sale was for 128,000 tonnes of soybeans for delivery to unknown for the 2022/23 marketing year.  Weekly export sales were decent for corn, coming in at the towards the upper end of estimates at 1.025 mln tonnes sold last week.  Soybean sales were okay at 513k tonnes but most of these old crop sales were previous sales being switched from unknown to China as the destination.  The markets have been in some very quiet trade range since the USDA published their final production numbers back in January.  Also, there's been some issues over that same timeframe with the CFTC reporting the estimated fund positions.  The day-to-day, week-to-week price action has not been reflective of how little the estimated positions have changed.  This has contributed to the market struggling to find direction.