3/7/2022

The Sunday night commodity futures trade was wild.  Crude oil gapped $6 higher on the open, corn opened 20 higher, soybeans opened 26 higher, gas traded to 35 cents higher overnight and set new all-time highs.  Market sentiment is typically the most bullish at the top and we may look back in a month or two and see this week as when we finally blew the top off of some of these markets.  Money is at the point of sending everything parabolically higher and when the dust finally settles, the consequences of the market run we are seeing right now will not be pretty.  The extreme volatility has also made for expensive options with some very wide premium spreads.  We had a sale announcement this morning of 132,000 tonnes of soybeans to China, split evenly between the 2021/22 and 2022/23 marketing years.  Weekly export inspections were strong for corn last week with 1.582 mln tonnes inspected for export.  Soybeans were mid-range with 766k tonnes inspected.  Corn export shipment pace is now 94 million bushels short of the USDA target compared to 100 million bushels last week.  The deficit has shrunk by about 50% since the beginning of the year.  Soybean export shipment pace falls short of the USDA target by 30 million bushels compared to 22 million bushels the previous week.  Early in the year, shipments had exceeded the pace needed by approximately 20 million bushels.

Resistance forming at 1700 on the May 22 soybean contract.