[Paul Yeager] Coming up on Market to Market while harvest rolls on, grain stacks up as the president vows to help soon.

One of the final government actions prior to the shutdown was a USDA report.

We look at what's next with a roundtable commodity market analysis with Kristi Van Ahn-Kjeseth, Karen Braun, and Ted Seifried.

Next.

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♪♪ ♪♪ [Yeager] Hello, I'm Paul Yeager.

The government shut down Wednesday morning.

Congress is still working with pay.

While most other federal workers are furloughed and a few could be out of work soon.

Today was the day we should have seen a new data point in the job market from the government.

Private estimates will have to suffice for guidance.

We did have a final government report, this one from USDA, that we will discuss in our roundtable format.

Kristi Van Ahn-Kjeseth is COO at Van Ahn & Co.

Ted Seifried is VP and Chief Market Strategist at Zaner AG Hedge.

Karen Braun is Chief Market Analyst at Zaner AG Hedge and prior to her role and when we booked her for this appearance, she was with the Reuters news agency.

We will hear from the three of you in just a moment.

But first though, we have to talk about the week and the markets.

The USDA report was bearish for corn and early harvest returns tend to be variable for the week.

The nearby wheat contract lost a nickel, and the December corn contract fell by $0.03.

Weather support is coming for soybean producers could be unveiled as early as Tuesday.

Until then, the market bounced higher on the president's Truth Social post the November soybean contract gained $0.04, while December meal increased $4 per ton.

December cotton shrank by $1 three per hundredweight.

Over in the dairy parlor November class three milk futures improved $0.51.

The livestock market was mixed.

December cattle gained $0.20.

November feeders put on $0.95, and the December lean hog contract declined by 3.75.

In the currency markets, the U.S.

dollar index fell 37 ticks.

November crude oil lost 4.52 per barrel.

Comex gold added $100.20 per ounce.

And the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index was lower by more than 14 points to settle at 546.65.

Joining us now, regular market analyst Kristi Van Ahn-Kjeseth, Ted Seifried, and introducing for the first time to Market to Market, Karen Braun.

Hello.

[Braun] Hello.

[Yeager] So I'm going to start with you because I want the news side of things.

You break down the news.

Tell me what's the lead story this week in the grains?

[Braun] That is so hard to say because at first it was kind of bearish.

Corn stocks report from USDA like you mentioned, a ton more corn than the market expected.

And then we shut down on Wednesday.

And then the Truth Social post with you know, aid coming to soybean farmers.

And we're not really sure what things are going to look like next week because again, the government is still shut down.

We have a lot of reports, a lot of data that we aren't seeing right now that we're used to, and a lot of resources are also not online right now.

So, you know, I think that we have really a ton of uncertainty looking into the next week, even a couple of weeks, depending on how long this lasts.

[Yeager] Kristi, we're in the dark right now on some things.

So, is the market giving us any indication about anything right now?

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] Yeah, I think the report told us.

Right.

We have more corn than we had this like the third or fourth bearish corn report.

Like they keep just adding more corn to the pipeline.

And the market has done such a good job shaking it off, which is very impressive.

And it felt like this was finally the report that was going to do it in for corn.

And then you got this post from President Trump saying, hey, I'm going to meet with him.

I'm going to focus on soybeans, obviously focusing on soybeans.

So not corn, but I think it was just enough saying you finally got an acknowledgment to farmers from President Trump.

It really you haven't seen that yet.

Out of this presidency.

And so, I think that was great.

And that kind of saved the market.

I am worried what it would have looked like had we not seen that post, especially with a lack of information.

One thing that's been keeping corn going has been our great demand, our export sales.

And so, if we're not seeing information, what's going to keep those buyers in?

[Yeager] Ted, though, fool me once.

I mean, what if something doesn't come Tuesday?

What if it's later?

What if it's not as strong as we think?

What if it's not meeting market?

There's a lot of what ifs hanging out over this weekend.

[Seifried] A lot of what ifs hanging out over the weekend.

What if.

What if four weeks from now, President Trump and Chinese President Xi meet and talk and nothing comes of that?

We don't hear soybeans again.

For example.

There's a lot of what ifs.

There's no certainties.

And taking away the government information makes more uncertainty.

So, I think that's harder for people that do a lot of fundamental analysis.

I mean, we sit here at tables and talk about fundamentals, but a lot of us also look at charts and look at price action.

And that is very telling as well.

And to Chris's point, when we've had three, actually, I'd say more than three bullish or bearish reports in a row.

Yet you have maybe not a positive reaction, but not as negative as it maybe could have been or would have been expected.

Like if you had told me we were going to see an extra 270 million bushels of corn on an old crop, ending stock and a new crop beginning stock, we should be down $0.15, but we weren't, and we were right back up the next day.

So, price action says one thing, news says another.

You got to kind of put both of them together.

And I think for now we're just going to have to work on price action.

We don't know what yields are.

We're not going to hear what the USDA thinks about that.

We are not going to see export sales.

So now we're just left with actual market charts.

Price action.

We'll see what happens there.

[Yeager] Karen, you love data.

Yes.

You love to stack things together.

And this week in looking at some of the things you wrote, there's this thought in rural America that USDA did it again, they just shuffle from here to take to there.

How does one make sense of any of that?

From a from an analyst standpoint?

[Braun] You know, this week I, I was kind of surprised by the numbers that we saw on Tuesday.

And, you know, all my calculations showed that that number, it shouldn't have been as big as it was.

But you know what?

We have to deal with it.

We have to digest it and we have to move forward.

And I think that, you know, without knowing what USDA would have said on their October 9th report, I guess we don't know if we're going to get it.

But, you know, assuming that we don't, we just kind of are making assumptions.

And sometimes that actually helps the market if we can kind of, you know, maybe speculate on things that could be happening that maybe aren't that in the past has actually supported markets.

Definitely.

In the case of soybeans, during the last shutdown that we saw a few years ago.

[Yeager] And sometimes data is a little slower to come back, even when this if the shutdown is what I think you said, if it's two weeks, we could still be delayed two weeks of information.

[Braun] It could be like a month.

Even so that so we could be in the dark on some of the key data.

One of the things that I wrote about this week was that hedge funds tend to heavily sell corn during shutdowns, and nobody can see that.

And you would think the price action would show you that that's happening.

It doesn't though.

They are selling and we are not seeing that data until way later, until it's already happened.

And so, it's a really big deal when speculators change their position, especially, you know, going from bullish to bearish.

Now they're not bearish now.

But you know how much selling or buying are they doing now.

Well, we're not going to know.

[Seifried] But if they're selling at a time frame where we're also bringing in a harvest that we didn't get any summer rallies to get our price targets hit.

And you've got that harvest pressure happening.

This could be one of those times where if they are selling and we don't know about it, and the producer selling, we don't know about it.

Price action could change to the negative in a hurry.

And we're all just kind of saying why nothing else is getting more bearish than what we've already seen.

So, behind the scenes, right?

And not being able to see behind the scenes right now, that's a tough situation.

[Yeager] Well, Kristi, how much does the average person care?

Maybe it's different from your side of the table versus the average producer, the commitment of traders.

Because what does that mean that we don't get on a Friday?

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] Yeah I think that just shows the general trend.

We know what managed money, what we index funds can do to a market.

Right.

So that plays such a role of the big picture of what they see happening.

And I think it plays a bigger role right now.

The hot topic of interest rates.

So, in a normal year, if you weren't talking about interest rates right now, it might not be as important, but you put the two of them together.

That's going to give you a good idea of what they want to do.

If they think that you see interest rates coming down, do they have the idea that they want to come into commodities on that back end?

And that could be supportive, but we're not going to know that.

And so, they're in kind of a flat position anyway right now.

Right.

They were sellers last week.

But that flat position, they have a lot of movement to go either direction.

And so, it'd be different if you were in a government shutdown.

And they were at one extreme or another, but now they have ample opportunity to go either direction if they really wanted to.

[Yeager] This is more of a Market Plus question, but I'm going to spoil it now.

Karen, we would have had a jobs and unemployment today on the general economy.

Instead, we're stuck with private estimate yesterday that showed hiring way off in September.

And the stock market has to respond to that.

Put that into context to grains and commodities.

And if that matters, on an overall picture of the economy.

[Braun] You know what I mean?

Like you said, it's estimates now, like whatever the trade is assuming.

And so next week we're going to be collecting estimates for what that October 9th would have been.

And those are going to basically stand in for that report.

Should we not get it.

And, you know, we might have to wait until next month.

Who knows how long it could, you know, the government could be shut down?

But the estimates that we see, you know, those are more important now than maybe they were in the past.

[Yeager] All right, Ted, let's talk about.

Oh, you got something?

[Seifried] Yeah.

I mean, how wide are the estimates going to be for corn and bean yields?

Right?

I mean, this October report is absolutely paramount.

To get an idea of what this crop size is.

And this year, maybe more than most because of the dry finish that we had and the disease issues that we have, I mean, the ideas on, on yield is such a wide range.

We don't have the official trade guesses yet.

I think I'm supposed to have mine due by Monday morning.

[Yeager] Homework over the weekend.

[Seifried] Yeah, homework over the weekend.

But I imagine that that could be a pretty wide range.

So, in that case, we're really just kind of left wondering.

[Braun] And we also unfortunately, if we do not get this USDA report next week.

I don't think that USDA will actually collect and process that objective yield data.

So, we won't see the pod counts.

We won't see the implied weights and stuff.

[Seifried] Terrible timing.

[Braun] And so yeah, like 2013 was the last time this happened in October.

And as an analyst, it's really frustrating to have to go back and exclude 2013 in the data set because you don't have that data.

And it's just unfortunate.

[Seifried] There's no way we're going to get a report next week, right?

Even if even if something happened over the weekend, there's still not going.

[Braun] Every day the chances plummet.

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] So yeah, I think at this point you're looking like it's just not going to happen.

The wait until November.

But you talk about the wide range of yield.

I mean, the thought process on yield has drastically shifted over the last month and a half from, you know, where you are.

So, I think the market mentality is that you're seeing these much lower yields and that you could see this low yield.

Who knows if USDA is willing to start that process of dropping it back down?

And so, if you're coming in here and having this market, expect that we're having lower yields, and USDA is going to eventually choose not to do that.

You know, that could be detrimental for the market, but you're still not seeing it for a while.

[Seifried] It could be positive in the short run because while the yield debate rages on, that is a potential bullish factor for the market.

That is an uncertainty that might be it might be the reduction might be bigger than what some conventional wisdom is thinking.

Right.

That's maybe supportive for the market.

It might not be good longer term if the USDA comes in in January, if they're back by then and, you know, gives us a 184 and the market is factored in 178 or something like that.

But for now, I think that's maybe supportive.

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] Yeah, which brings back to Karen.

You know, sometimes this uncertainty is actually a benefactor of the markets.

And we could possibly see that.

And hopefully you're able to do that and hopefully you're able to gather some other stories, take kind of fundamentals off the table, use some chart action.

And if you were to look at December corn, get above that gap.

That could be something that maybe you weren't able to do if you had hard data sets.

[Yeager] We'll continue to speculate on the speculation about that.

All right.

Let's talk wheat for a minute.

Kristi, this is new contract low.

Yeah.

Still nothing good.

Yeah.

It's the same old, same old.

Any help in this market coming anytime soon?

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] No, I think this comes back to, you know, maybe it's nice that we're taking a fundamental break.

Right?

Not to beat the drum again, but maybe it's nice to kind of take the fundamentals off the side and say, now we're looking at a chart.

And if we could just.

And this has been like stated over and over and over again.

But if you could just build off of one of these new contract lows and really have some great chart action and bring some buyers in, I think that could be so huge for wheat market, but it seems like we cannot do that.

The seasonal does start to flip where you could buy bring some buyers in.

Right?

So, I do think that's positive.

But until I see the chart actually flip and you can start to pencil out some extensions, you're in like no man's land for this wheat contract.

And it's not fun.

[Yeager] And this weaker dollar isn't exactly detrimental to the market, but it doesn't seem to be helping it.

[Seifried] Yeah.

I mean obviously when the dollar is lower, that opens up the door for possibly more exports.

But also, you know, when the dollar is worth less, not worthless, but worth less.

That should mean commodities are worth more.

To your point, it really hasn't helped out a whole lot quite yet.

Although the angle of descent in wheat has really slowed down, wheat does seem like it's been trying to put in an overall bigger, broader bottoming formation.

Even though we do make contract lows, contract low closes, we do bounce back from that, and we do have a very sideways pattern.

The biggest help for wheat might come from corn.

If that's the case, and global fundamentals for wheat are, I'd say, slightly positive but stagnant.

They've been positive for a little while.

Overall, our domestic balance sheet isn't positive.

If we're going to have a good bullish wheat fundamental story, we're going to have to blow the blow.

The export expectations out of the water.

And we were kind of doing that and now we won't know.

So that's a shame.

[Yeager] Karen, you opened your first thing you said was the bearish Corn Report.

And corn.

You do a lot of data on what harvest is of corn.

What are you hearing?

Because we're going to rely on you now for a lot of estimates.

[Seifried] Yeah, we are.

[Braun] Yeah.

So, you know what I most people that I talk to are still in their beans really heavily, especially this week.

But some of the early reports I mean, I have heard all over the board, I just don't think that we're deep enough into corn harvest to really be able to get a good measure.

You know, I, I think the people that are having trouble with their harvest, you know, they are always louder than the people who are seeing great results.

And so given that we're still I think we were maybe, what, 20% or so as of last Sunday, harvested on the corn.

I just think that's not quite enough to really know.

But again, I have heard all over the board honestly at this point.

[Yeager] So that doesn't give us much direction yet.

And again, we don't know.

So biggest story that a producer should be looking at for corn this week without this information.

[Braun] We actually might be getting those export inspections data we did last time during the last shutdowns.

Because food inspections are deemed essential to operations, so we still might be able to see those big weekly shipments.

Hopefully we maintain that in corn that can just, you know, remind us, hey, we still got this good export program.

But really, you know, without seeing kind of how this stocks data would have played out on USDA's, you know, WASDE this month, it does leave you, you know, option to speculate what it could be.

And I think that the market does tend to be a little bit more optimistic.

I think it airs on optimistic, whether that's warranted or not.

Yeah.

[Yeager] Kristi, are you optimistic about corn right now?

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] I would like to see it move one direction or another off of for 20.

Like it's just stuck there.

I think, you know, it would be more fun watching paint dry than watching corn over the last month for it just will not move.

So, I'd like to see it move it.

I like that it's not giving up.

You know, you have literally thrown everything you could at corn.

I mean, the bushels that you've added into the pipeline over the last three months are huge.

I mean, that is something these reports that we've consistently gotten, I send out a recording after we do it, and I find myself laughing when I'm sending these out because I'm like, this is absolutely atrocious and ridiculous that we can add in 400 million bushels, 700 million bushels at a time.

And the market is shrugging it off.

So, it's showing resilience.

I just worry, eventually, four months from now, five months from now, even if we drop, let's say we drop yield to 182.

You're still looking at like 1.5 billion more bushels of corn production than we had a year ago.

So that means that over the course of this marketing year, you're going to have to sell that many bushels of more corn.

And so that means every time you get a corn rally, you're going to be met with farmers selling more than you did last year.

And farmers selling killed the market last year.

Last year was a prime example of where we should have gotten higher.

We had the carryout levels to get higher.

[Yeager] Ted did anybody sell beans on Thursday?

Given the bump.

[Seifried] I think the bigger selling came in on Friday, and I think right now we're not seeing a ton of harvest pressure for corn because we're really focused on beans.

Beans are at very low percentage.

We're going out after those beans in a big, big way.

You could see all the dust on the way here in the seven years I've been coming for the same week, I've never seen this much dust being kicked up at once.

It's all been dust.

It's very impressive.

So, the harvest pressure is happening for beans.

I think we saw it at the end of the day on Friday that I think will carry over into next week and maybe even the following.

The corn harvest pressure is yet to come.

And that's what kind of scares me about corn is like, we keep talking about given bad numbers, we've seen some good price action, but I think that is a lack of producer selling at this point for soybeans.

My big concern about all this dryness is, you know, I'm not really hearing a whole lot of people talking about how terrible their yields are.

The overriding thing that you're hearing is, is dryness or moisture percentage in single digits, things like that.

I worry about the quality.

Right.

And so, when we're talking about is China going to come in and buy or do they want to come in and buy 8% beans.

Are they are we giving them another reason or is it not?

We're not giving it to giving them a reason.

But you know, our beans might be giving them another reason to say we're going to try to avoid this as much as possible.

So, I think that's the question that I have on my mind.

And I don't know, I want to say that the yield potential should be lower for beans because of the dry August that we had, but is it enough to offset any loss of business that we've seen to this point?

Even if we do start to sell to China later on after this meeting, is it going to be enough to, you know, offset a drop or still have a relatively tight balance sheet?

And, I don't know, I guess the feeling for that is maybe not.

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] And what Ted's talking about for the dry finish of beans, that's not one area that's across the board.

Everyone had a dry finish to the growing season, right?

[Yeager] Okay.

I want to see if you're going to take this bait.

Is it possible China could be buying right now as we speak, given that there's not that we know who you kind of mentioned, there could be some interesting buyers given this opportunity.

Hey, we won't know for a while, but is it possible?

And what would that mean?

[Braun] Is it possible?

Sure.

Anything's possible, but I would vote no.

I would vote that they're not.

Because, look, we're still priced too high.

With you, when you incorporate the tariffs, they can still get stuff from Brazil.

They just got a bunch from Argentina last week.

So, I think that China is pretty satisfied for the moment.

And I think that to Ted's point, if you know, you send China 8% beans, actually they would like that because they do prefer us beans for storage because they are drier.

And so that and they tend to fill their reserves with us beans instead of Brazilian beans for that reason.

So that's actually should not be a deterrent.

But we're sitting here in early October and China by this time normally books about 40% of their U.S.

soybean needs for the year, about 40%.

And we are at zero now.

[Yeager] Okay, Ted, I have a cattle story that popped up today.

Cargill is going to shut a Colorado plant down for ten days.

We've had a free fall and cutout value.

We've had $50 break from the highs.

Finally, is the high in?

[Seifried] It's a great question.

You know, the thing that hasn't come down is animals, right?

I don't know.

You know, you have you have a market where everybody's been calling for a deeper correction or a high in the market.

And it just doesn't happen every time you look like you're about to break out to the downside.

Like Thursday, even you come back, you have a nice bounce off that that trend line or whatever support it finds.

You have a nice bounce off of it like we did on Friday.

I don't know, I think a lot of it is economy connected.

You know, we are still paying the high prices at the butcher's counter.

Yes, we have negative seasonality right now, but the market just hasn't really wanted to break.

I do think we should be due for a correction, a deeper correction, but again, we pretty much any analysts I know has been calling for that for months and we still haven't seen it.

[Yeager] But Kristi, here's another piece of news.

This may be impacting the feeder market more come Thursday.

There was the potential that they might have a vaccine for the new World screwworm and that the border might open back up with Mexico to the U.S.

What is that also factored in here in the feeder market?

[Van Ahn-Kjeseth] I think that could be what would bring the deeper correction.

So, until we see that the market is doing exactly what it needs to do at support lines, it's just tried and true.

Those buyers come in, you might start the day off five bucks lower in feeders, but by the end of the day, those buyers come in.

And so, until we see something change, which the things that could change would be opening up the border in Mexico or working with Brazil on their tariffs and seeing Brazil beef come back in like the Brazil thing does, doesn't seem likely anytime soon.

I could be wrong.

We know that stories can change very fast, but I don't see that correcting itself anytime soon.

So, it would be the border, it would be the vaccine.

And that news came out and I think the market handled it pretty well.

So, I think this market is saying, prove it to me before I'm going to take this serious.

[Yeager] Hogs kind of rebounded a little bit on Friday, but it has been a tough sledding for that market.

Any indication where we're headed next?

[Seifried] Yeah.

Big break off the highs that we had last week.

You know again there to you can say we had a very overbought market.

And this is a technical correction.

And that we held our 50-day moving average in our trend line.

Very well.

Right.

That's what bull markets do.

They make new highs.

Then they come back down to that trend line.

You know weights are high I we're a little bit behind on marketing.

I think if there was a time to break this should be it.

I think we'll find out more about that next week.

I do think that we're overcooked there.

I do think there could be a deeper correction there for the hog market.

[Yeager] All right, Karen, I'm going to give you the last few seconds here since it's your first time.

We're going to be nice.

And I'm not nice after today.

This livestock story given, you know, there's people who will talk about the farmers having it.

Great.

Because livestock is this.

But they're not having a great because beans are doing that big a story in rural America right now as we sit here in early October?

[Braun] Oh, that's really tough.

I honestly think the trade issues are just really front and center right now, because if we have trade barriers, you know, especially with our largest trade partner, China, you know, that just hinders our ability to, you know, move product to, to be dominant on the global market.

And it just kind of backs up supplies here and really just changes the dynamic of what we need to be doing going forward.

I mean, it could completely change in the case of soybeans.

It could change what the market actually looks like as early as next year.

So, I think these trade issues, especially with China, just given how important they are and how much of our stuff they've taken, that that is just really the biggest thing.

And we might not find out for another four weeks, you know, when they Trump and G talk next.

[Yeager] There's a there's a big concern that four months could turn into 4 or 40 years if we're not careful.

[Braun] Right.

There's that risk.

[Yeager] There's that risk.

[Braun] There is that risk.

[Yeager] You do absolutely.

Everything okay?

[Braun] Yeah.

[Yeager] All right.

Thank you.

So that's Karen Braun.

That's Kristi Van Ahn-Kjeseth.

That's Ted Seifried.

Thank you, Ted.

[Seifried] Hey thanks, Paul.

Great to be here.

[Yeager] Thank you everybody.

Thank you Kristi, and thank you for watching because you've been watching the analysis segment.

In a moment we will continue our discussion in the online only segment search Market Plus.

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Thank you so much for watching.

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