The Morning Vibe
28/03/13 -- Noticed anything funny recently? I have. The regular gaggle of Septics that I follow on Twitter seem to have been getting up and tweeting remarkably early. Insomniacs all over America appear to have been on Twitter at ridiculous o'clock in the morning. What's up with them I thought? Then, last week I noticed that the USDA's weekly export sales report that normally comes out at 13.30 UK time was getting posted about on Twitter well before 1 o'clock.
The sneaky old Septic Tanks have only gone and moved their clocks forward more than two weeks ago now. On Sunday Mar 10th at 2am to be precise. I don't recall there usually being a 3 week gap between "us" and "them" changing the clocks, do you?
Anyway, the upshot of all that would seem to be that as we are still stuck firmly in the winter here in Europe, then today's eagerly awaited USDA report on acreage and stocks will actually come out BEFORE we've all got our coats on and are ready to go home. At 16.00 GMT to be precise. At least I think that's correct, although with all the different time zones in America I could be talking entire bollocks (not for the first time I hear you cry). No doubt somebody will email me to tell me if I am.
Meanwhile, now that we've noticed, we can keep a sneaky eye out to see if the weekly export sales report comes out at 12.30 GMT, if it does then we are onto a winner. Probably. Right now that's cleared up what else is going on this morning....
First off this is an interesting read: 100 new jobs for Humber region in £700m biomass boom in what is almost certainly the first time that The Grimsby Telegraph has had anything interesting to print other than the price of fish in some considerable time.
ABP it would seem are to built a new terminal at Immingham Docks specifically designed to handle wood pellet shipments for Drax.
Whilst you're on there maybe you'd like to treat the missus and avail yourself of a couple of tickets to see the Lee Evans Tribute Night at the Queens? Early bird tickets are only a fiver. That's right there's a bloke doing a tribute act of that totally unfunny sweaty oik Lee Evans. Christ on a bike, is this what it's come to? Somebody pretending to be Lee Evans, pretending to be Norman Wisdom, pretending to be Mr Pitkin? The Albanian Quarter in Grimsby will be rolling in the aisles. On their own I imagine.
Back in the real world, the overnight grains are doing nothing to get excited about this morning. Any positioning ahead of the USDA has already been done by the looks of it.
MDA CropCast have upped their forecast for Australian wheat production in 2013/14 from 22.6 MMT to 23.3 MMT, although that's still a little below the 24.0 MMT estimate from the USDA's Canberra FAS office yesterday.
Their US winter wheat production estimate is unchanged at 1.829 billion bushels. "Very cold temperatures returned to the southwestern Plains this past week, which resulted in some damage to jointing wheat. Temperatures should moderate a bit this week, though, and freeze threats will lower," they say.
In Europe they highlight persistent rains in southwestern Spain "maintaining wetness and high disease threats for wheat."
All the markets are closed tomorrow. Europe remains shut on Monday, but Chicago will be open as normal.
Next Monday also sees the resumption of the USDA's regular weekly crop progress reports released after the close.