Corn Closes Higher on Thursday

Corn futures closed the Thursday session with contracts 4 to 9 ¼ cents, as traders were positioning themselves ahead of Friday’s USDA reports. 

Prior to those USDA reports, a Bloomberg survey puts the trade average guess for US corn yield at 176 bpa, down 1 bpa from July. 

The weekly Export Sales report from FAS showed old crop bookings in the range of analysts’ expectations at 191,813 MT. That was also a 7-week high. Mexico was the top buyer of 134,100 MT. New crop sales in the week that ended on 8/4 were tallied at 191,340 MT, on the low end of estimates. The top buyer was Italy at 105,000 MT, which was previously announced via the daily system. 

Strategie Grains slashed their estimate for the EU corn crop by 10 MMT to 55.4 MMT. Brazil’s CONAB took the country’s estimated corn crop production estimate down 0.97 MMT to 114.69 MMT, mainly on a revision lower to the second crop. 

Sep 22 Corn  closed at $6.29 1/4, up 8 cents,

Nearby Cash  was $6.92 5/8, up 5 1/4 cents,

Dec 22 Corn  closed at $6.27 3/4, up 9 1/4 cents,

Mar 23 Corn  closed at $6.34 1/2, up 8 3/4 cents,

New Crop Cash  was $5.93 7/8, up 9 3/8 cents,