• Hot on the heels of yesterday’s price rout in Chicago we saw Egypt’s GASC slip in a crafty wheat tender for 21-30 September shipment! Of note was the 13% maximum moisture limit that would, once again, potentially present issues for EU (read French) exporters. They picked up 175,000 mt at an average price of $194.74/mt (basis C&F) with 115,000 mt from Ukraine and 60,000 mt from Russia. The price paid was some $4/mt below that paid earlier in the month when they broke the $200 barrier for the first time in ages, in a tender that attracted more than 1.4 million mt of offers. Today’s business, once again, reflects the desire of traders to secure sales as the FOB levels reflect a discount of between $5-10/mt below quoted replacement levels.

• Today has seen a degree of consolidation in the market following yesterday’s plunge in prices, which followed the release of the latest USDA figures. Short-term direction will be driven largely by the volume of rainfall across Central US growing regions.

• The USDA has today released its weekly export figures as detailed below:

Wheat: 422,200 mt, which is within estimates of 400,000-600,000 mt.
Corn: 531.100 mt, which is within estimates of 350,000-750,000 mt.
Soybeans: 756,800 mt, which is within estimates of 300,000-1,000,000 mt.
Soybean Meal: 334,100 mt, which is above estimates of 25,000-175,000 mt.
Soybean Oil: minus 800 mt, which is below estimates of 5,000-20,000 mt.

• The figures could hardly be described as exciting, wheat figures reached around half of the prior week’s level, new crop corn at 20 million bu was the best of the season to date and new crop soybeans at 26 million bu were down 14 million bu from a week ago and compare with 43 million bu at the same time last year. This may be considered a depressing set of figures from a US exporter’s perspective!

• Brussels has issued weekly wheat export certificates amounting to  390,395 mt, which brings the season total to 2,488,255 mt. The season to date total is 524,278 mt (26.69%) ahead of last year.

• Stratégie Grains has updated EU 2015 soft wheat output to 144 million mt, a 3.1 million mt increase month on month although it is around 4% down year on year.. Barley was forecast 1 million mt higher at 58.8 million mt, which is down 3% year on year whilst corn at 59.6 million mt was 7.1 million mt down month on month and 21% down on last year’s record 75.7 million mt level.