To start the day, corn is up a little and spot meal is mixed, down in the nearby but up a couple of dollars higher for future months.
Today the trade will be watching how U.S. gasoline usage fared last week in the EIA status report to see how things are moving during the pandemic.
But moving beyond the news, we wanted to discuss new crop rolled corn. Today prices are being offered in the upper $170s FOB for new crop clock. Nobody can tell you if buying new crop anything is going to be a good buy or a bad buy. These markets are impossible to predict, they were before the pandemic and they will be after.
If someone tells you they have a good feeling corn (or any commodity) will do X or Y, take it with a grain of salt.
As you can see in the continuous corn chart below, corn rallied above $3/bushel in the Fall of 2006, during a record harvest, due to strong demand from ethanol and livestock. It rallied for two years before tanking during the Great Recession.
Even then, it never got below $3/bushel. It fell to a low of $3.09 the week of December 9, 2008 and was $3.81 a week later. A $25/ton move in one week. It rallied all the way to $4.44 per bushel by June 1, 2009 and fell during that summer to a low of about $3.20 by August 2009. A $44/ton move down.
That year was pretty turbulent as the U.S. tried to claw its way out of recession. Then the 2010 growing season saw flooding and then drought send corn prices above $6 per bushel and stay there through June 2013.
That gets us to the prices we’ve essentially been using to for the past seven years. And though it’s hard to tell by looking at the chart, corn hits its highs in the early summer – probably because there is always some weather scare that gets the market bulled up.
One take-away from that brief history of corn prices in the 2000s is that predicting what’s going to happen by trading the news won’t work.
It’s better to trade corn based on your own balance sheet. Does today’s offer work for your bottom line (at least today)? Maybe it’s worth owning some if the answer is yes. If no, then wait and watch.
To get an offer on new crop rolled corn, call your Penny-Newman salesman.
Thank you,
Paul Quinn
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