Grain > Commentary > 3-30-2023

3/30/2023

Mar 30, 2023

Two-sided trade with a lower finish for corn and a slightly mixed soybean close on Thursday. The market takes a bit of a breath one day ahead of a huge report day and settles near the middle of the 5-week ranges for corn and soybeans. The daily ranges were also much tighter than what we have become accustomed to, with the most volatile corn contracts trading 6 cents and soybeans staying within 12 cents. Weekly net export sales were within the trading ranges for corn and soybeans with 1.036 mln tonnes of corn and 348k tonnes of soybeans sold last week. As expected, China was the headline buyer of old-crop U.S. corn but there are currently no Chinese purchases of new-crop U.S. corn on the books. We had another sale announcement this morning, this time for 178,000 tonnes of corn for delivery to China during the 2022/23 marketing year. That's 11 out of the last 13 business days we've seen a flash sale of corn to China. It has not been record volume in that timespan but some of the steadiest buying we've seen since the impressive string of sales in 2020. Reminder: The reports drop at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning. Have sell orders working!

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