Spring is the time when the green shoots appear, six months of frozen dog poop melt down into a single layer of filth, roads go soft and people in downtown Winnipeg start lining up on the street for hot dogs at carts.
It’s also the traditional time for a rally in the crop markets, as road bans and busy farmers lead to elevator companies improving basis offers to get anything to come in, and as the futures markets try to convince farmers to plant enough of a crop to satisfy all the buyers’ needs.
But this year there isn’t much sign of a spring rally, at least not in the main U.S. futures markets. Look at these charts and tell me if you see convincing signs of a rally:
Doesn’t look like much of a rally to me. But actually, it is, according to an American analyst I spoke to this morning that slight rise since the beginning of April is meaningful. “It’s starting, it’s starting,” he told me.
That would be a blessing, after the general trickling downwards of the crop markets in the past few months. This analyst thinks the odds are on for a couple of months of crop prices rising.
I’d like to leave you today with another beautiful chart. It’s not as serene, gentle and gradual as the one I showed you yesterday. This is not an impressionist work, like those soft paintings of ballerinas by Degas or riverside revelers by Renoir. This next picture is more violent, brutal, dramatic, like a futurist or a cubist painting. This is the pork market’s Picasso-doing-Guernica following the recent surprising hogs and pigs report.
Talk about a violent break with what could have been the beginning of a downtrend. A vicious gap! A violent rise! Imagine being caught short there at $76 and not covering until today! Because this is a farm newspaper and many of our readers sell pigs, this sudden shot back up higher is beautiful. I suppose if I was writing for a packers’ or grocers’ or consumers’ magazine I’d call it appalling. But there you have it, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and what is gorgeous to some of us is horrifying to others. C’est la vie. And that’s art.
