June 19, 2007

 

CBOT Corn Review on Monday: Settles with thin losses in choppy trade

 

 

Chicago Board of Trade corn futures ended modestly lower Monday, as light speculative selling offset early strength based on overnight gains and forecasts for hotter weather at week's end, analysts said.

 

July corn settled 3 cents lower at US$4.16 per bushel, September slipped 2 cents to US$4.24, and December fell 3/4 cent to US$4.23 1/2.

 

The market is focused on the weather at this time of the year and concentrated on the weather system moving through the U.S. Midwest the next 24-48 hours, said Clark Neighbors, an analyst at Bump Investor Services, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

 

The forecast for the end of the week didn't change much but the radar indicates rain in parts of the eastern U.S. corn belt Monday, and that made it hard to be a buyer, he added.

 

The recent rally in wheat futures has helped supply support for corn, but early weakness in wheat also weighed on the market, a floor trader said. However, some support was generated by the unwinding of wheat-corn spreads established previously, Neighbors said.

 

The inability to take out a high established in December in overnight electronic trading led to light speculative selling, the floor trader added.

 

Export inspections were released during the session and had little market impact. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported inspections were 37.26 million bushels for the week ended June 14, within the 20 million to 40 million bushels expected.

 

The corn market took a breather and is waiting on Monday afternoon's crop progress report and the overnight weather forecasts for market direction Tuesday, an analyst said.

 

Analysts expect corn conditions to decline by two to four percentage points in the good-to-excellent category, from 77% recorded last week.

 

Commodity fund selling was estimated at 3,000 contracts.

 

In options trading, ADM Investor Services bought 4,000 December US$3.30 puts. Tenco bought 2,000 September US$4 puts and sold 2,000 December US$5 calls.

 

On daily technical charts, July remained above its major moving averages.

 

Oat futures ended mixed with the funds liquidating their July positions and rolling into December, an analyst said. Favorable weather in Canadian oat growing weather also limited buying interest, he said.

 

July oats fell 3 cents to US$2.89 per bushel, while December gained 2 cents to US$2.94.

 

Ethanol futures ended lower in modest trade. July ethanol settled 5.1 cents lower at US$1.998 per gallon, and August declined 6.4 cents to US$1.946.

 

Monday afternoon, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is scheduled to release the weekly crop progress report at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT).