Wow.
What a difference a couple of hours makes.
When I left the office mid-Wednesday morning to drive out to farm country, the ag commodity markets didn’t look good, but they didn’t look terrible either.
While I was out driving the gravel roads of rural Manitoba, the stock market crashed again, with its biggest decline since that black day in 1987, and ag commodities couldn’t escape that great sucking sound. Chicago corn futures broke through that powerful psychological barrier of $4 per bushel and other crops stumbled through the rest of the day.
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It seems like every time the stock market calms down, commodities begin to trade again on their own virtues and vices. But every time the stock market erupts – which is happening with alarming frequency – commodities lose their ability to trade on their fundamentals and join the deathride.
What’s going to happen today? Who knows? Overnight the Nikkei plunged and European markets fell, but as I had breakfast Bloomberg TV was reporting that Dow, S and P and Nasdaq futures were up. Here at about 9 a.m. the Dow’s up, while the TSX is down. But what that’s going to mean for commodities today, and what’s going to happen to the stock markets today, is a guess I’m not willing to make.
