With the government shutdown in full effect, there won’t be any export sales reports until Congress can pass a budget resolution. However, we can still look at the estimates this week for a rough idea of what the sales might look like. Allendale commodity broker Greg McBride talked about this week’s estimates for both corn and soybeans.
“Yeah, on corn, the estimate came in at 1.2 million to 2 million tons. You had the bean number come in somewhere between 301.6 million. The beans effectively are just kind of limping along here, whereas the corn is just—it’s far and away the best thing we’ve got to talk about when it comes to exports. The problem is, now with the government shutdown, we don’t really know. I mean, we know they’re good, but we’re not getting any additional information to help us know exactly how good they are.”
McBride also gave a guess of what the flash sales might’ve been like for this report.
“We did know that, for last week, we had flash sales—flash sales that equated to over 700,000 tons. So that’s why we would have guessed we were somewhere in the range of 1.8 million tons for the corn number. On the bean side of things, we’re not getting any flash sales out of the beans. So best guess would have been probably somewhere around 700,000 to a million tons. But we don’t even know where that’s at right now.”
Navigating the marketplace will be difficult for the time being, but McBride said there’s one thing we know for sure- the prices will be very volatile.
“Volatility is the right word for it. You know, the overall sentiment, just from what we had from Tuesday’s report on the corn side of things, should have been—should have been bearish. You know, adding about 200 million bushels to last year’s final number effectively adds 200 million bushels to the new crop number, even though we will see maybe some yield adjustments or maybe an export number adjustment. The problem is, we don’t have the USDA for right now, so we’re kind of flying blind on that.”
Much of that volatility will come from price action and any social media posts made by the Trump administration about global trade deals.
“All we’re doing is kind of reacting moment to moment on price action, which—ahead of the report—was negative, and after the report, it’s just kind of ‘watch the spreads, watch the price action.’ We started out negative yesterday, and then we got a tweet—or a Truth Social post—from President Trump that said he was going to be meeting with President Xi of China in four weeks. And the big topic, or one of the big topics of conversation, is going to be soybeans? Well, yeah, it should be. That’s the number one item that we sell to the Chinese. Of all things, it’s either airplanes or it’s soybeans. So that should be one of the main topics of conversation, and that got the market excited.”
However, these trade meetings were announced months ago, so there shouldn’t be as big a reaction as we have been seeing in the markets. McBride said he’s concerned about the longevity of this market enthusiasm…tape
“We’ve known about that meeting coming up for months. We knew that at that APEC meeting in South Korea, that these two leaders were going to get together and have a conversation. So it wasn’t anything new that we heard. It just so happened that, at the right time, we got a tweet, and it took the market higher—and it’s continuing to take the market higher. That’s not a bad thing. The problem that I have with this is that it makes it a little bit concerning on whether or not we can hold that type of enthusiasm for the next four weeks while we wait for that meeting to happen. We all want higher prices, but are we going up on anything that’s real, or is this just kind of a dead-cat bounce, flash-in-the-pan type of movement that’s going to effectively disappear in front of our eyes by the end of the week or early next week?”