In about eight minutes time, I’m going to be listening in on a grains and oilseeds outlook for 2010 given by a U.S. market analysis firm. And I’ll be doing another one Thursday. And another one probably every other day for a while.
It’s that time of year when everyone looks back at 2009 and what a year it was and looks forward at 2010 and guesses what it will be like. Easy to look back. Hard to look forward.
It’s the job of market analysts to predict the future, and so they have to do it. And the more confident they sound the more likely we are to listen to them. But I wonder if they feel a bit of trepidation about trying to guess the future when the last couple of years have been such wild riots in the markets, and the state of the world right now is hard to figure out, let alone what’s going to be happening next November.
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Fortunately for the analysts, most people recognize that guesses about next year are just guesses, so they aren’t held to them too intensely. And by next year at this time, no one will likely remember what they said last year at this time or be able to dig up their 2009 crop market outlooks from the mountain of papers on their desks. I know I put a bunch aside last year at this time so I could do precisely that this year, but who knows if I’ll be able to find them.
So, what are they saying about 2010? I’m about to find out . . .
LET THE FLOOD OF FORECASTS BEGIN!
