12/8/2021

Corn finished mixed after trading 3 cents on either side of unchanged.  January soybeans bounced 25 cents off of early session lows to finish 10 higher on the day.  At 8 am this morning, the USDA made an export sale announcement of 1,844,040 tonnes of corn to Mexico, split between the 2021/22 and 2022/23 marketing years.  That tonnage of corn is the equivalent of about 72.6 million bushels.  A much-needed corn sale announcement. They also announced 130,000 tonnes of soybeans to China for the 2021/22 marketing year.  Weekly ethanol numbers showed a bump up in production of 55,000 barrels/day to 1.09 mln bpd.  Ethanol stocks also increased by 163,000 barrels to 20.46 mln barrels.  Tomorrow at 11 a.m., the USDA will release the monthly supply and demand report.  The trade average estimate expects an 18.2 million bushel cut in the US ending stocks for corn, for a carry out of 1.475 billion bushels.  On a global scale, US FOB values for corn are relatively uncompetitive, so any price rally above current levels will be extremely unfriendly for adding export sales.  Soybean ending stocks are expected to increase 14.7 million bushels to 354.7 million bushels.  A lack of any excitement in tomorrow's report could see managed money sidelined until the new year.

Corn and soybeans had been down hard leading into November’s WASDE report and we bounced on a “less negative than expected” report.  This month we are pushed up against trendline resistance for corn and soybeans which has me bias towards pricing some grain ahead of this report.
 
We can see some wild price action at the 11 a.m. report drop, it never hurts to have an order in to grab 600’0 corn futures or 1300’0 on the soybean board but they can only hit if they’re working.