Chicago | Reuters — U.S. soybean futures rose on Wednesday, rebounding from their lowest in nearly three months on a round of mild bargain buying, traders said.
Wheat futures rose on support from short-covering as well as disappointing harvest yields in key hard red winter wheat-growing areas of the U.S. Plains. Corn followed wheat higher, with short-covering also noted after the front-month contract dropped to a four-month low on Tuesday.
“The wheat has probably been the strongest thing out here,” said Mark Gold, managing partner at Top Third Ag Marketing. “Weather is a little bit tough for harvest, slowing things down and there are some quality issues. The funds are short wheat so we have seen a little bit of short-covering.”
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Chicago Board of Trade soft red winter wheat futures for July delivery closed up 5-1/4 cents at $5.87 a bushel (all figures US$). K.C. July hard red winter wheat ended 15-1/4 cents higher at $7.27-3/4 a bushel.
“Wheat caught a wave of chart short covering today, led by the Kansas contract, with more talk of stinky yields out of Oklahoma on the harvest,” Charlie Sernatinger, analyst at ED+F Man Capital, said in a note to clients.
CBOT July soybeans added 10-3/4 cents to $14.09 a bushel while CBOT July corn rose 2-3/4 cents at $4.41-1/2 a bushel.
Soybeans gapped sharply higher early in the session due to a U.S. Agriculture Department announcement that exporters had sold 140,000 tonnes of soybeans for delivery in the 2013-14 crop year, further depleting tight domestic supplies.
But prices for the benchmark July contract failed to hold technical support above its 100-day moving average, pushing the market from its highs.
“Soybeans have been sold off pretty heavily over the past month and there comes a time when the market starts to question whether the good news about large new crop supplies has now been priced in,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank.
Expectations of large U.S. harvests of both corn and soybeans have weighed on prices this week after USDA’s crop conditions report on Monday showed both crops were thriving across the U.S. Midwest during their early development stages.
— Mark Weinraub is a Reuters correspondent covering grain markets from Chicago. Additional reporting for Reuters by Michael Hogan in Hamburg and Naveen Thukral in Singapore.
