Firm cattle futures may lift local prices

Firm cattle futures may lift local prices

Possible U.S. trade deals could serve as a boost for market sentiment

Manitoba cattle auctions were quiet over the Christmas and New Year holidays, but firmness in U.S. futures markets could bode well for prices when activity resumes in the first sales of 2020. “I’m looking for a rally in the fats (butcher cattle) into about March,” said Ben DiCostanzo, senior analyst with Walsh Trading in Chicago.

Loading grain on a vessel at a Burrard Inlet terminal. (Maxvis/iStock/Getty Images)

Ocean freight rates trending lower

MarketsFarm — The Baltic Dry Index has fallen sharply over the past four months, dropping below 1,000 points to start the New Year. A slowdown in iron-ore activity, as high prices have had Chinese mills buying up domestic inventories rather than importing from overseas, accounted for much of the general weakness in the freight sector,






While every year presents its own challenges and opportunities, a number of themes kept reappearing with only slight variations.

Looking back at the decade that was in grain markets

As the ‘teens come to a close, it’s been 10 years of enormous change

The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ There was no shortage of market moving topics to write about over the past decade, from the demise of the Canadian Wheat Board to the rise of tweet-based international diplomacy, but did anything really change? Grain and oilseed prices had their ups and downs, but