GRAINS-SOYBEANS HIT 1-YEAR LOW ON BENIGN U.S. WEATHER, CHINESE DEMAND WOES

June 15th, 2018

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Category: Grains

(Agriculture.com) – Chicago soybeans slid on Friday to their lowest since June last year as benign weather across the U.S. Midwest raised hopes for a bumper harvest, while concerns over Chinese demand also weighed on the market.

Wheat edged higher following two sessions of deep losses, while corn eased for a third consecutive session as commodity markets remained under pressure from a stronger dollar.

The Chicago Board of Trade most-active soybean contract was down 0.8 percent at $9.20 a bushel by 0236 GMT after marking its lowest since June 29 at $9.18-1/2 a bushel. The contract was down for a third straight session.

Wheat rose 0.2 percent to $5.02-1/4 a bushel and corn dropped 0.2 percent to $3.62-1/4 a bushel. “A U.S. dollar headwind adds a degree of difficulty to a soybean market that is roughly at the ‘right’ price level,” said Tobin Gorey, director of agricultural strategy at Commonwealth
Bank of Australia. “Seasonal selling and investors selling long positions were already headwinds.”

The dollar index gained about 0.2 percent to a two-week high of 94.973, after rallying more than 1 percent on Thursday.

For the week, soybeans are down 5.1 percent, extending two-week losses to almost 10 percent.

The wheat market has dropped 3.4 percent in what could be its third consecutive weekly decline and corn has lost 4.1 percent, on course for its biggest weekly slide in a year.

Favourable weather forecasts are raising expectations for bumper U.S. corn and soybean production. Neutral conditions are likely through the Northern Hemisphere summer this year, a U.S. government weather forecaster said on Thursday, indicating that the extreme weather patterns known as El Niño or La Niña are less probable during this season.

Concerns about trade tensions with China, the largest buyer of the oilseed, continue to overhang the market. U.S. President Trump has made up his mind to impose “pretty significant” tariffs on Chinese goods, an administration official said on Thursday, as Beijing warned that it was ready to respond if Washington chose to ratchet up trade tensions.

China is the biggest customer of U.S. soybeans as it imports 60 percent of the oilseed traded worldwide.
U.S. wheat prices rose nearly 4 percent on Tuesday after the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut its forecast for Russia’s crop but lost most of those gains on Wednesday with overall global supplies still seen as ample.

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