The Morning Vibe

27/10/14 -- The overnight grains trade lower, extending their Friday night losses. The official London wheat closes from Friday were nowhere near as bad as those for Paris and Chicago wheat, and the latter's losses have now been added to on the Globex market, so we can expect London wheat to play catch-up this morning when trading begins shortly.

The USDA will report on US harvest progress later tonight. As of last Sunday the soybean harvest was 53% complete and corn 31% done. If US growers follow the recent pattern then they will have put more effort into getting their beans in than their corn again last week. So we may seen soybeans around 68-70% harvested tonight, with corn somewhere around the 43-45% done mark.

Weekend weather in the Midwest appears to have been pretty friendly. Brazil got some rain too, and there's more in the forecast, improving conditions for planting full season corn and beans.

Brazil's leftist President Dilma Rousseff narrowly won re-election there on Sunday. That could keep the Brazilian real under pressure, which is bearish for the grain markets as it makes their exports more competitive and increases the domestic price paid to the Brazilian grower, in theory supporting strong plantings.

As well as tonight's USDA crop progress report, we are also expecting the latest review of EU 2014 yields from MARS later today. Thursday brings the IGC's October report and the USDA's regular weekly export sales numbers. The Nov Paris rapeseed contract expires on Friday.

The Kazakh Ministry have raised their forecast for this year's grain crop from 14-15 MMT to 15.5 MMT in clean weight, or 17 MMT in bunker weight. Last year's crop was 18.2 MMT in bunker weight. They've harvested 16.2 MMT so far off 87.5% of the planned area.