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Huge Corn Sales Surprise the Market

This week's corn sales were reported at marketing year highs doubling analyst expectations.

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In the overnight, soybeans and wheat traded lower slipping 5 ¾ and 5 ¾ cents respectively, while corn stayed mostly unchanged increasing by ¼ cent. The export sales report was very supportive for corn, neutral for wheat and bearish for soybeans which missed analyst expectations by a significant margin.

Wheat sales beat analyst expectations by a small margin, booking 458,400 metric tons which is up 61 percent from last week’s export sales total. Despite beating the analyst expectations which ranged from between 200,000-400,000 metric tons, traders will need to see a much larger pick-up in sales if prices are to be supported. Corn export sales were reported at a marketing year high booking 2,185,400 metric tons which was well above the 800,000-1,000,000 metric ton trader’s expected out of this week’s report. Old crop soybean sales were reported at 14,100 metric tons well below analyst expectations of 400,000-700,000. Soybean sales recorded a marketing year low this week.

Export Sales:

Expected Actual

Corn 800,000-1,000,000 2,185,400

Soybeans 400,000-700,000 14,100

Wheat 200,000-400,000 458,400

Yesterday, the EIA ethanol production report showed output increased by 1000 barrels per day to 979,000 barrels per day this week. This brings ethanol production to a year over year increase of 5.4% compared to the USDA’s forecast in the January WASDE report which expects corn used for ethanol to increase only .8% year over year. Ethanol stocks also inched higher by 158,000 barrels this week to a total of 20.39 million barrels in this week’s report. Compared to last month ethanol prices have fallen from $2.20 to $1.27 per gallon.

The Agricultural ministry in Argentina announced an increase in their wheat production estimates after harvest has wrapped up. Argentina is expected to have harvested 13.9 million metric tons of wheat in the 2014/15 season up from its previous estimate of 13.2 million metric tons. The ministry also lowered its planted acreage for corn and soybean’s by .1 million hectares and .2 million hectares respectively.

Yesterday the International Grains Council increased its 2014/15 global corn production to 992 million metric tons up from 982 million metric tons in their previous forecast. This revision takes into account the USDA revision lower in the U.S corn crop, but that production loss is was more than offsets with larger production from Ukraine, Argentina, Brazil and Europe.

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