Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Two Commodity Aphorisms

1. "Good crops get better."
2. "Bad crops get worse."

I heard those a few years ago and have noticed they tend to be true more often than not. So the wheat crop has problems after the freeze and with all the rain hurting the harvest, so I'm long wheat (December, Chicago). I figured the chance of a bearish surprise is more than a bullish one. And the wheat crops in Ukraine & Russia are in real trouble. And the world needs to restock its wheat stockpiles after last year's crop problems in various places, including the US.

You DO have to WAIT for the crop to become "good" or "bad". Neither corn nor soybeans are there yet - they won't be until July.

In a way, these two fundamentally based aphorisms are reasons why trend speculation in commodities can work.

9 comments:

Bud said...

Wonder where i can get data on the ...uh....'mary jane' harvest? I know the US governmant has the stats.

Bunkerman said...

lolol bud.

si said...

bunkerman, what do you think about measured target of 1570 on sp, based on the previous run up before the pullback.

si said...

timewise , i guess we still have another 2 months to accomplish that

Bunkerman said...

On the weekly chart, the last pullback got support on the prior upper trend line. So that suggests a new trend cahnnel is being formed at the higher levels. And the last moves up from the penultimate pullback lows look like about 200+ pts. Hmmm, and this pullback low was about 1380. So 1570-80 sounds about right. But would make a pretty short up move in time on the weekly unless it was a grinding move. Which seems likely this summer to me.

So thinking "out-loud" that seem reasonable, Si.

Bunkerman said...

So if that was followed by a pullback, we could get to my target of 1700 by year end ;-)

Bunkerman said...

Hmmm. And a fibonacci .318 pullback after a 200 pt move would be about 1500 from 1570. Then the next 200 pts up gets to ... 1700 Cool. That would make the fibonacci doubters suffer ;-)

si said...

wow, great seems like we have some numbers to work with, thanks bunkerman

Bunkerman said...

Good weather finally. I think I'll water my tomatoes & goof off.
Good luck.