Finally some action.
And with new life in the canola market, the last two weeks of this year’s Canola Commodity Challenge at www.canolachallenge.ca look to end the virtual marketing competition with a bang, rather than the whimpering the market has been making all winter.
For me, a poor fool, there is no hope of good results from this year’s marketing season, unless canola prices go through the roof in the few days before the April 14 drop-dead date. But for the smart guys and gals who marketed a substantial part of their crop in the autumn before the bottom fell out of the market, this recent rally offers the chance to make those last sales at a better price than has been available since late November.
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Oh, how I remember those halcyon days of mid-November, when my naiveté led me to think $270 per tonne was far too cheap a futures price at which to sell my virtual canola. Would that I could recapture that innocence again. I swear I would not look so askance at plain but reasonable prices that my elders told me were attractive prospects.
Why did I think I could do so much better?
Well, over the winter I haven’t been willing to face up to my poor judgment, and didn’t sell a thing. That hasn’t really mattered much, because after canola futures prices fell from the $270s to the high $240s, they just sat there and looked ugly, and even I wasn’t dropping my standards that far. I decided that if that was the price I was going to have to marry, I’d drag out the misery right until the final April 14 date.
There was a sickly looking February rally that took prices back above $250 briefly, but I let that one go. Too proud, still.
Now, luckily for me, a much better looking rally has come along and dragged futures prices back up to $260. Just in time. I can sell at least some of my canola at a less-humiliating futures price now. Which is what I started doing last week. But I’ll never catch up to where I would have been if I had dumped all my crop in late November, when the analysts were beginning to say that looked like the best thing to do.
I expect I’ll end up in the bottom third of the market, a fitting fate for a poor marketing strategy.
I readily admit that when I go to the Canola Commodity Challenge website I am envious of the success of M. Daalder of Alberta-British Columbia, who has achieved a post-basis price so far of $261.04 per tonne,
S. Manning of Manitoba who has managed $254.91 and
T. McKee of Saskatchewan who has earned $258.29. If those prices represent a large portion of their 1,000 tonne game crop, they’ve managed to hit the peaks of this year’s market and appear unchallengeable.
My average so far, after three transactions in the last week, stands at $237 per tonne.
As the sands of time fall to the bottom of the hourglass and this game ends, some important canola marketing lessons will have been learned by the players.
I’ll look at what those are next time.
