Grain and livestock markets were mostly quiet (outside of lean hogs). Is this the calm before the storm or the start of the Holiday trade
And that gets us to our next guest who is Oliver Sloup, Blue Line Futures in Chicago. Oliver. Yeah, you made a comment when we were off air. A lot of these contracts of hung up the old Gone fishin sign. Yeah. This reminds me of my grandfather’s old corn market where, you know, you’re trading in a $0.01 range over the course of 3 hours.
It’s now probably more exciting to watch paint dry. But nonetheless, you and I both got to show up to work and try to drum up some sort of a narrative. There was some news this morning, weekly export data for corn. It was kind of ho hum up 10% from last week, but down 12% from the four week average.
So not a lot to write home about there. I think a lot of the attention, you know, going into the end of the year is going to continue to be on soybeans with the weather situation down in South America and Brazil particularly. And it’s probably a good thing that there are some weather concerns down there because if there weren’t, I have a feeling we’d be trading sharply lower just on the price action alone.
We’ve got some good reason for this market to trade higher, but we really haven’t gotten that move higher. So it makes you wonder if that weather concern wasn’t there down in Brazil, where would we be trading? So it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. I’ve been talking to some hedge fund managers down in Brazil. They’re still looking for expectations on overall production to be lowered going forward.
But the USDA isn’t going to make that that huge adjustment right out of the gate. They’re going to continue to slow play it lower. Just question about your grandfather’s corn market real quick. Did a grandfather ever tell you that we traded in eighth back in the day? Yeah, he did. He did, yes. So, yeah, you probably remember those days from the floor.
Right. Thanks a lot and all of our. But I’ll take that as a compliment. Well, we weren’t trading names, We had gotten rid of them by then, but that’s why we caught that corn board. You know, that’s why a quarter cent is too, because that represents 2/8, right? In three a half. Four is a half and six is three quarters because those are all still quoted in eighths, even though we don’t trade the s the biggest take as a quarter cent.
So a lot of folks don’t know that. So it’s time for throw that out there. Great content as usual. Stay right there though. We need to go away. We’re going to pay some bills. We’re going to come back and talk more livestock and maybe a little bit more history about the markets. I’m old enough for. We right back after this.
is it safe to buy cattle? Is it if you manage your risk accordingly? Right. I think a lot of the people that needed to get out of long positions have probably exited those. And you’re starting to see the market consolidate here as we enter the last couple of weeks of the year.
So I do think that we probably have carved out a little bit of a short term low. We did get some export sales this morning for beef is 10,600 metric tons, which isn’t really anything to write home about, but it’s certainly better than what we’ve seen over the last month or so. So I guess there’s a silver lining there.
I think my caution flag would be the fact that we saw a basically everything rally following yesterday afternoon’s Federal Reserve meeting, and I thought that would have popped cattle quite a bit more than they’re trading right now. So the fact that we’re not seeing that and a risk on trade seep into live cattle is a little bit of a caution flag, but I’m still pretty optimistic that we can continue to at least stabilize at these levels.
Yeah, I think a nice sideways trade over the holidays would probably be a nice, healthy thing for those cattle traders because man, it’s been it’s been pretty brutal and I think that that’s a great we got 30 seconds but that’s a great lesson in a sentiment change, right? I mean, there’s something psychological here to not just fundamental traders, not just technical traders, but sometimes you have to, you know, take into consideration that our strong sentiment and be real quick.
Got 15 seconds. Yeah, 100%. And it was the FOMO at the high. You know, when we topped out, everyone had the FOMO, the fear of missing out. And at the bottom you just get that, you know, that deep pit in your stomach. And that’s usually kind of at the low end of the range. So I agree holiday trade is probably going to be the best thing for this market going forward.
All right. Great stuff, as usual. Thank you very much for taking the time with us today. Oliver Sloup is with Blue Line Futures. He’s Batten clean up. He did a good job. We’ll bring it back home and let’s send it back to you. Thank you, Scott. Of course, Kelechi Close coming up at the top of the hour, looking—-
Oliver Sloup, VP & Co-Founder, Blue Line Futures