(Reuters) – Chicago wheat slid for a second session on Friday from 11-month highs as a forecast of wet weather in the U.S. grain belt triggered profit-booking by investors.
Soybeans were little changed, holding on to gains of the last four days, with tightening U.S. supply underpinning prices.
Chicago Board Of Trade May wheat has risen more than 2 percent this week, its third consecutive week of gains. The front-month contract has gained almost 17 percent in three weeks, the biggest rally since July 2012.
May soybeans have risen 3.2 percent this week, rebounding from losses of nearly 5 percent last week and May corn is down 1.4 percent in its second consecutive week of declines.
Wheat fell 0.3 percent to $7.02 a bushel by 0301 GMT on Friday, soy was largely unchanged at $14.33-1/2 a bushel and corn almost flat at $4.79 a bushel.
“There is a forecast that U.S. hard red winter wheat may receive some beneficial rain in the first week of April,” said Luke Mathews, a commodities strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “We haven’t seen any disruptions in the Black Sea region… the market is questioning whether the gains that we have seen are justified.”
Commodity Weather Group said forecasts turned slightly wetter for the last days of March and first days of April. Still, the Plains breadbasket should remain mostly dry for most of the next 10 days, stressing the hard red winter wheat crop as it comes out of dormancy.
Wheat from other parts of the world should be able to make up for any disruption in supplies from the United States with expectations of bumper production in Europe and India.
Analyst Strategie Grains on Thursday raised slightly its forecast for this year’s soft wheat harvest in the European Union as it increased estimates of the area sown with wheat in some EU countries. India is likely to produce a record crop of close to 100 million tonnes, according to estimates from traders and officials.
In the soybean market, tightening supplies in the United States continued to support the market. However, traders said that imports of soybeans from South America should help alleviate the tightness.
A leading Chinese soy buyer is in talks to resell five or six cargoes from Brazil, equivalent to about 360,000 tonnes of soybeans, to the U.S. market, an executive at the firm said.
