One of the buzz words that seems to be on just about everyone's lips at the moment is "volatility".
No matter which market you look at - cereals, dairy or meat - prices are subject to frequent and, at times, quite violent change. The collapse in many commodity values from the 2007 peak to the 2008 trough was about as dramatic as it comes.
With this in mind, I was somewhat struck this afternoon when I glanced at the London grain futures market and noticed that, for every single contract, the position read "unchanged".
OK, it's Friday afternoon and grain traders are probably still in the pub. But looking back over the past few weeks, the grain market does seem to have been unusually quiet.
Nearby wheat futures have been trading at about £102-£104/t for most of the past month, while on new crop, November 2010 has been around £114-£116/t. One market report to cross my desk today described the trade as "dreary", while another said it "lacked direction"....
To some extent, that's not surprising - the market fundamentals have been firmly established for some time, at UK, EU and indeed global levels.
Publication this week of DEFRA's first official estimates for the UK, which put total wheat availability at 17.87m tonnes, domestic demand at 13.68m tonnes and exports at 2.16m tonnes, caused hardly a ripple in the marketplace.
Sterling, perhaps the biggest single factor in moving prices up and down, has also been fairly stable this autumn, hovering around the 90p/euro mark, give or take a pence or two. One could even be tempted to feel that the market is now set fair for the rest of the season.
Don't be fooled! Things can change very quickly in the grain trade, and often do.
For example, recent reports from the Southern Hemisphere suggest all is not going as well as it once was for the Australian harvest. Brazil is also struggling to get its wheat in and will be more dependent on imports, while the USA and Canada are well behind schedule with their maize harvests. Yield losses here could impact on demand for other course grains, giving a jolt to prices.
Meanwhile, it is understood that US investment funds are starting to reassert their influence on the Chicago soft commodity markets. These guys thrive on volatility - and where Chicago goes, so the Paris and London futures markets tend to follow.
So, while grain markets may look quite stable right now, it could just be the calm before the storm....
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Is the U.S. delay in corn harvest entirely due to weather factors they mention, or is there a fall back in machinery and investment, government support, we know what hits UK production which has been brilliant since 2003 until this year ?, but Russia, Brazil are so buoyant they are thinking of helping China from one and presumably the Zimbabwe comments and South America situation show a big improvement in local support for food stock, plus the overseas assistance and European Union grain stores in Africa. It is unusual for U.S. to show this even if they complain rigorously as they always do. Without effort here UK production would not have succeeded so well, have the U.S. farmers lost hope and started to vacate the land?