The corn market sold off on Friday while following soybeans lower on bearish comments from President Trump. Friday’s news resulted in the Funds recording their biggest selloff in several months adding 30,000 contracts to their short position. Despite the large volume of sales, the market only closed 5 cents lower. For the week December corn lost 6 cents while March and May futures lost 7 cents. The funds ended the week short 126,323 corn and short 5,742 soybean contracts.
Friday morning, China formalized their port fee charges on US ships in response to the US charges that go into effect Tuesday. The charges by China mirror that of the US at $56/ton and will increase over time thru 2028. In response to this announcement, President Trump declared that he is considering massive increases in tariffs on Chinese products coming into the US as well as other countermeasures. He also stated that didn’t see a reason to meet with Chinese president Xi at the APEX summit in Korea in a couple weeks. Prior to Friday’s comments, Trump had been assuring the market that he and Xi were going to meet to discuss US soybean trade and other items. He said that he was confident that he would deliver a trade deal for which China would return to importing soybeans. This negative news resulted in soybeans quickly trading 20 cents lower and corn following the weakness. China has yet to book any new crop soybeans from the US and estimates are that their reserves are large enough that they could cover demand for 3-4 months before needing to buy.
With the government still in shutdown mode, there was no October WASDE released last Thursday, and no weekly crop progress report released. Estimates are that 29% of the US crops have been harvested. Until the government is back up and operating, traders will be relying on their internal data and private group estimates to determine what stocks and production look like.
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