Commodity Chart of The Week

Each week longleaftrading.com will be providing us with a commodity chart of the week as analyzed by a member of their team. We hope that you enjoy and learn from this new feature.

Gold has been a frustrating market for a lot of traders for the last few months. If you are the buy and hold type or one who tries to find dynamic trends to capture, gold has not been an attractive market for you. Gold, however, is now getting interesting and could provide a move this week, especially if markets get negative and a flight to safety bid enters the market.

The market has been building a solid base since the January lows and technically we are now getting to a point where a move could occur if we can penetrate the upward portion of the wedge you can see in the chart above. The top of the wedge and the 50 day moving average both come in right at 1685/ounce and a close over that level would bode well for gold if it is breached. Continue reading "Commodity Chart of The Week"

Commodity Chart of The Week

Each week longleaftrading.com will be providing us with a commodity chart of the week as analyzed by a member of their team. We hope that you enjoy and learn from this new feature.

The copper market is very sensitive to both Chinese growth statistics and US Housing numbers. Both groups have been trending in the right direction for months and that has given the copper trade a boost. Last week's US housing numbers missed, blunting a nice move off of support the prior week. It was reported last week that China's manufacturing activity in January grew at the fastest pace in two years, according to the preliminary HSBC China Manufacturing purchasing managers' index, which rose to 51.9 in January from 51.5 in December. This growth trend bodes well for China's 2013 economic outlook and it is in line with the comments from the IMF made the prior week, with respect to projected growth in China.

The fundamental forces at had set a nice backdrop for copper, but as we all know that does not amount to much if the market is not providing a way to enter a trade with a strong risk/reward profile. The technical developments in copper appear to be orderly and I will be looking to come into the copper this week based on the strong technical picture. Continue reading "Commodity Chart of The Week"

Commodity Chart of The Week

Each week longleaftrading.com will be providing us with a commodity chart of the week as analyzed by a member of their team. We hope that you enjoy and learn from this new feature.

Often times it is easy to get carried away with looking at what is front of us to forget what is around us.  Let’s begin this today acknowledging the price action of late in the corn market has been lackluster at best.  After such a robust market move this summer, where we saw record corn prices at $8.41/bushel’ the market has been consolidating that move since.  The threat of the extreme dryness ended as we moved into harvest in the late fall and that sent a huge percentage of long specs to the sidelines.

We now sit at $6.85/bushel and most of the news flow remains negative.  Commercials are not anxious buyers of corn and the demand numbers of late have been week.  Calendar spreads (March/May) do not provide elevators an incentive to sit on their stocks looking for a time to sell in the future.  This has pushed a lot of grain forward to the cash market, suppressing the price.

Weekly export sales have also been very slow.  Last week came in at 49,100.  Because the market needs to see sales at 464,000 tonnes to reach the USDA forecast, this leaves the market in need of a lot of foreign buying to get back on track to meet that forecast. Continue reading "Commodity Chart of The Week"