Well, after getting back from a few days of our Western Producer conference in Saskatoon (all internal stuff of no interest to normal human beings but oddly fascinating to we ink-stained scribblers) I’ve been trying to catch back up with the grain markets.
Fortunately there was a USDA stocks report this morning, so that gave me a chance to see what the smart analysts are saying. I asked for a succinct summary from the ag Twitterverse and got a great one in reply:
Read Also
Growth plates are instrumental in shaping a horse’s life
Young horse training plans and workloads must match their skeletal development. Failing to plan around growth plates can create lifelong physical problems.
Rather well written, I must say. Twitter forces one to become concise and funny.
So I’m a bit caught-up with that. I’m also crawling through a lot of self-generated charts and am trying to figure out what exactly the big correlation between the commodity complex and both soybeans and canola means.
Here are the charts I chucked together at www.barchart.com:
That’s January soybeans and the CRB index of commodities. That’s pretty severely correlationy. So what does that mean?
How about this one:
So over a longer period of time the CRB index and soybeans were trending together, then diverged, then joined up again.
What does that mean?
How about this one of Jan canola and soybeans:
Not very nice to see canola fall off a cliff at the end there, eh? But over the course of the last few months, very locked-at-the-hipsy.
So we’ve got soybeans and canola roughly tracking each other, and both going along for a trot with the CRB index and the rest of the commodities complex.
What does this mean for the outlook for this historical grain market rally? Does it have independent life going forward, or is it just a tag-along to the CRB? Will canola just track soybeans, or could that break? (Yes, I know there’s lot of volatility in the canola-soybean spread, but that disappears in the long charts and that’s what I’m interested in.)
These are all answers that a rather tired – after two big confs in the last week – ag journo needs to find, today’s the day to find them, and that’s what I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find out. Cripes, I feel too mentally tired to handle this. Alright – off to Starbucks to load up with caffeine and confidence, thence to calls, perchance to truth.
Anyway, gotta fill some space.
