Soybeans were surprisingly lower, well kind of surprisingly, you forget how US centric the US grain futures markets are sometimes and how little confirmation of events like the flooding in Argentina can have on the US markets if something US centric is occurring.

For instance yesterday three forecasting entities in Argentina all dropped their outlook for soybeans there. This was simply confirmation of what most traders had expected and some even said they expected the drop to be larger than what it was in these reports but at the end of the day everyone now agrees that the Argentine bean crop is much lower than it was 30 days ago. The reductions were between 500kha and 900kha, the remaining area producing roughly 52.9mt of soybeans.
In the USA the mainstream media was stuck with Trump while the grain markets saw the Farm Futures US soybean planting projections at 8.5% bigger than last year and  corn down 3.7%. This had the punters walking away from beans and into the corn pit. ICE and Paris canola contracts were surprisingly both firmer by the close.

There wasn’t a lot to talk about in the wheat market. Regular tender activity from Egypt and Asia went as expected and the prospect of some rain across the US hard red wheat belt next week was considered a little bearish, but SRW managed to close a little higher.