Corn Sits Fractionally Higher for Report Day

Corn is trading fractionally higher ahead of the weekly Export Sales report. The March contract traded from -2 ¼ to +1 cent overnight. Corn futures printed new lows on Wednesday and ended the session with 3 ½ to 5 cent losses. Traders added 25.4k new option positions in corn yesterday, including 16k new calls. Into report day, CME had 1.176 calls for every put across the corn market.  

Analysts are looking for corn bookings to come in between 600k MT to 1.3 MMT for old crop during the week that ended 2/1. New crop export sales for that week are expected to be below 150k MT. 

Trade surveys collected late last week showed expectations that USDA would tighten the 23/24 U.S. corn carryout by 12.7 mbu on average in this morning’s WASDE report. Global corn carryout is expected on average to tighten 600k MT with a 2.2 MMT smaller Brazilian crop expected. 

EIA’s weekly update showed ethanol producers were again averaging +1m bpd following the dip in output during the January cold snap. Producers averaged 1.033 million barrels of ethanol output daily during the week that ended 2/2. Ethanol stocks built another 509k barrels to 24.779 million. 

The monthly Census data confirmed 189 mbu of US corn was exported during December. That was up from 141 mbu in Nov and was the largest December total since 2007. The official season total was up to 754.2 million bushels. Census marked ethanol exports at 156m gallons for Dec ’23, which was the largest for the month since 2011. Milo shipments came in at a Dec record 1.007 MMT. 

Mar 24 Corn  closed at $4.34 1/4, down 4 1/2 cents, currently up 1/2 cent

Nearby Cash   was $4.15 7/8, down 4 1/2 cents,

May 24 Corn  closed at $4.46 1/2, down 4 cents, currently up 3/4 cent

Jul 24 Corn  closed at $4.55 1/2, down 5 cents, currently up 1/2 cent