Mark it on your calendar. We are in the dullest marketing week of the year. If the six-week period between Thanksgiving and the New Year is boring, we are now in the worst part of that period. Expect nothing to happen for a few days.
Of course, if the world blows up tomorrow (not literally, but in the sense of surprising news) all bets are off, but the easy money is on nothing happening.
Think about it. Traders are loafing with their families for a week. A few are stuck at trading desks just to handle whatever comes in, but what is going to come in?
Doing little
Elevators are not hedging farmer sales because the farmers are doing as little as possible. The last few days they have been doing more than they planned, as they are plowing snow from farm yards and county roads to keep their cars and the milk trucks running. They are cutting extra wood for the wood burner, and they are thawing the water line that goes to the hog barn.
The feed and ethanol folks got their positions established a long time ago. Mostly they have taken advantage of the recent break in prices to buy futures, but that has been done. Nobody takes a spec position this week on purpose.
The advisors who might recommend new positions are home, and most advisory letter writers have taken the week off. So, that leaves me. I still have space to fill this week, and I am filling it with the warning up front that I don’t have anything much to say except to tell you I expect no news.
Nothing to see here, but read to the end anyway. I might have some family story that you appreciate.
The good news this week is that there is no news. No news this time of year is good news. The war in Ukraine goes on, but the Ukrainians continue to confound the world with their ability to defend themselves.
Volcanic activity
Volcanoes are erupting on the big island of Hawaii, but that doesn’t affect our grain prices as near as I can tell. The biggest cattle ranch in the U.S. is actually on this island, but the cattle are doing fine.
On a personal note, I remember walking across the crust of Kilauea, the current volcano of note, in 1970. I was alone, and it was lovely, but lonely. It was several miles, and it felt like walking on the moon.
I walked over near the vent where lava had shot 1900 feet into the air a few years earlier. I told myself that no one on the planet knew where I was, but the park service must have thought it was safe. I would have felt better if there had been anyone else in sight.
A few weeks later it began to erupt, so maybe the park service was wrong. I hope their seismic equipment sent out a warning.
Wheat
There are no particular warnings in the grain markets right now. We are a little surprised that prices got cheap again, especially wheat. Some countries are having trouble raising wheat, including ours, so this might change. It was too dry to germinate wheat in some parts of the Great Plains this year, so expect abandonment.
We continue to be surprised that wheat prices are lower now than when the war started. I can’t tell if the hungry Africans who are having trouble getting Ukrainian wheat don’t matter to the world market, or if the war news is becoming just background noise to a market made up of people that filled their bellies on Christmas.
Reminder
My daughter made an entire beef tenderloin, and her teenagers, helped by GrayPa, engorged themselves with it. They buried it in A-1; I used a little horseradish sauce, just to remind me of my little bit of British heritage.
It was the second best beef I ever tasted, after Bill and Laura Barnett’s limousin beef, and it was a reminder of just how rich our country is. Not only do we have stores that sell tenderloins, but we have people with good enough jobs to buy them. And, they are not living in subway stations and bombed out apartment buildings with no heat or electricity.
Markets were closed Monday for the official Monday holiday, and they will closed again next Monday for the New Year’s Monday. Then, it is back to business as usual, and we will start following every nuance of grain production and consumption, looking for some secret that might make us money.
Some time this winter, we will decide if the export market, which has been dependent upon Russian fertilizer for years, will have enough fertilizer for us to plant our crops. Right now we have prices that tell us to export fertilizer, and that can’t be good.
