US wheat futures continue to come under pressure from lagging exports. The punters were of the assumption that a slowing in Russian exports would occur from January into their new crop and the USA would “pick up the slack”. This might be occurring a little into the Asian markets but this is probably more to do with the Australian production problems than a lack of Russian sellers.
US wheat exports are better than they were six months ago but they continue to fail to meet the export volume required to achieve the USDA projections thus the potential for US wheat stocks to build year on year is high.

One of the big issue here is the US Gov shut down. We are seeing export loading reports but we are not seeing export sales reports so we don’t have any idea what is sold and waiting to be loaded.
The chance of the US actually being able to meet the USDA estimate of 27.22mt of wheat exports looks minimal when considering exports are only now at 14.38mt with just four months to go. Weekly exports need to average around 716kt to make the target.

Russia continues to dominate the global wheat trade with current 2018 / 19 exports totalling 25.3mt. Their final figure is estimated to come in at about 38mt. The Russian Ag Minister announced that 2019 / 20 wheat production is expected to come in at about 67mt with exports similar to this year.