Highlights
Definitions:
Moving average: a commodity’s (or stock) price for the past X number of days averaged each day; a 20 day closing price moving average would add the settlement of the past 20 days and divide the answer by 20. Tomorrow, the oldest day’s settlement will be removed and replaced by tomorrow’s settlement price. A moving average could be the opening price, the high for the day price, the low for the day price, etc.
Short: When a person sells futures contracts (or anything) before he buys futures contracts (or anything), that trader is “short the market.” The big spec funds are heavily “short” corn and wheat and have added more short contracts to those short positions most of 2023.
Short covering: When a trader, who is short the market, buys contracts to offset his short (previously sold) positions; he is liquidating his short position, aka covering his short positions.
Yesterday’s price rally appears to have been primarily short covering due to:
A lack of farmer selling.
Failure of the rainy season to start in Brazil’s main growing area
Dry weather is reducing Australia’s and Argentina’s wheat crops which will be harvested November to January.
Fourth consecutive week of better than a year ago US export sales.
Corn delivered to China (Asia) from the PNW is 35¢ cheaper per bushel than Brazilian corn according to Eduardo Vanin, export grain trader in Brazil.