Chicago | Reuters — Chicago grain and soybean futures tumbled on Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, pressured by slow demand and technical selling and as traders liquidated positions ahead of Thursday’s first notice day for deliveries.
Chicago Board of Trade March and May corn futures and all wheat contracts fell to contract lows while soybeans declined to a three-week low.
“There’s liquidation,” said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co in Chicago. “We pushed new lows in wheat and corn, sparking new selling and that is pretty much the story.”
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Chicago Board of Trade wheat fell 2.8 per cent to $5.61 a bushel (all figures US$). Corn declined 1.7 per cent to $4.55-1/2 a bushel after sinking to $4.53-3/4, the lowest for a most-active contract since December 2020. Soybeans fell 0.1 per cent to $13.29-1/4 a bushel after earlier sliding to their lowest since Nov. 2.
“We’re kind of stuck on a holiday affair here,” said Dale Durchholz, a private commodity risk consultant in Bloomington, Illinois. “The volume and interest in trading has started to go down at this point so things can get a little bit sloppy simply because there is not a lot of volume and liquidity to offset it.”
After trading settled, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported 50 per cent of winter wheat received good-to-excellent ratings, one point higher than expectations from agriculture analysts.
Soybeans found some support out of Brazil, where 2023-24 planting had reached 74 per cent of the expected area as of Thursday, agribusiness consultancy AgRural said, making it the slowest progress in eight years as the country grapples with bad weather.
The market continues to closely monitor weather in the top exporter nation, where crop-threatening conditions remain in the forecast.
Some new demand for wheat was seen, with international tenders issued by Pakistan and Bangladesh. But cheap Black Sea wheat, especially from Russia, was tipped to win the business.
— Reporting for Reuters by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; additional reporting by Michael Hogan and Naveen Thukral.
