Morning All

Posted by Nogger - a legend in his own mind at 08:20 | Categorized as

24/10/11 -- Morning all, a virtual coconut to anyone who can identify where this picture was taken and where I am going to be spending the week. Just up the coast from Whitby, this my chumkins is the picturesque little seaside town of Staithes - boyhood home of Captain Cook.

I will be here all week, so blogging activity will be restricted but I will be doing some daily updating as it's a perfect excuse to go to the pub to access their wifi.

The overnight grains opened lower, turned sharply higher, but are now easing off those session highs in what looks like being a fairly volatile session. Now that Europe is starting to wake up it will be interesting to see where things end up this afternoon.

There doesn't seem to have been a great deal of progress made over the weekend towards a resolution of the European debt crisis. More like finger pointing and back-stabbing if you ask me.

The US dollar is weak, with the pound almost breaking through 1.60 in early trade and crude oil is around a dollar firmer.

Rabobank have upped their Australian wheat crop estimate to 25.7 MMT, I think that it will prove to be higher than that in the end.

Ukraine's export duties on wheat and corn got lifted over the weekend and Egypt announced that it will resume imports from the Black Sea nation for the first time since 2008 in what is clearly a move to attempt to bring prices down even further.

Egypt's next tender results will be very interesting.

Ukraine meanwhile has brought in a grain harvest of 47.3 MMT so far off 90% of the planted area.

Kazakhstan's harvest has reached 28.8 MMT in bunker weight, implying a clean weight crop of almost 26 MMT which in turn suggests a wheat crop of around 22 MMT.

China says it imported 4.13 MMT of soybeans in September, 11% down on September 2010. Year to date imports are 37.71 MMT, 6% lower on those in the same period in 2010.