Bye, Bye, Fund Money

08/04/13 -- Friday's Commitment of Traders Report from the CFTC made interesting reading, highlighting the extent that fund money has pulled out of the grains in the week through to last Tuesday night.

Their corn long was more than halved from around 192,500 lots to little more than 98,000 lots, for a net withdrawal of some USD3.7 billion. They also cut their soybean long by 35,000 contracts, or 31%, to 112,000 and added a further 13,000 worth of CBOT wheat shorts, taking their net position now to just over 35,000 short.

Overall the data shows them pulling a net USD7.5 billion out of the grains sector. For interest they also took USD3.9 billion out of metals too. Some of the money went into energy (up USD2.5 billion), but the rest of it seems to have disappeared - from commodities at least.

Saxobank say "this was one of the biggest weekly reductions since 2008 almost wiping out the net amount bought the previous two weeks.

Fund length in now heavily concentrated in the energy sector at USD49.3 billion, as opposed to USD7.7 bln and USD7.6 bln respectively in metals and grains.