Nogger's Blog

17/02/12 -- The overnight grains closed higher with beans up 10-12 cents, corn up 4-5 cents and wheat up 7-9 cents. Crude is almost a dollar higher and the USD is weaker.

There's not much change on the week as a whole for corn and wheat but beans are up around 40 cents including the overnights.

In a raft of export business the USDA have announced the sale of 132,000 MT of corn to South Korea, 120,000 MT of wheat to unknown, 20,000 MT of soyoil to Morocco, 173,000 MT of beans to China and a further 2.75 MMT of new crop beans also sold to China.

There seems to be plenty of business about as you can see, and America seems to be the cheapest shop in town right now.

There are signs that Ukraine are more or less done selling wheat, although a private Israeli group is said to have bought Ukraine wheat and Russian corn this week. The latter was also conspicuous by it's absence in yesterday's Egyptian tender.

South American crop conditions appear to have stabilised. EU wheat probably hasn't suffered as much damage as the market thought, but we don't know that for certain yet.

Monday is President's Day in the US so the markets there are closed.

Once again (how many times is this?) there is optimism that Greece will get it's wretched bailout money approved on Monday. If it does then I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to go over there and insert it one euro at a time up the entire Greek cabinet's back passage.

It looks like we are going higher tonight, if however the Greek deal turns out to be yet another false dawn all bets could be off and back down we go again when Chicago resumes trading again on Monday night.

Early calls for this afternoon's CBOT session: corn up 3-5 cents, wheat up 7-9 cents, beans up 10-12 cents.