GRAINS-Chicago soybeans, corn and wheat futures stumble on farmer sales, weekly dollar gains
Updates with U.S. trading
By Renee Hickman
CHICAGO, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Chicago soybean, wheat and corn futures tumbled on Friday as a flurry of farmer sales and a strong dollar weighed on the market, said analysts.
The most-active soybean contract Sv1 on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) was down 22-1/2 cents at $9.89-1/2 a bushel by 1144 a.m. CST (1744 GMT).
March wheat, the most actively traded month Wv1, hit a contract low of $5.27-1/2 and was down 16-3/4 cents at $5.29 a bushel.
CBOT most-active corn Cv1 lost 9-1/4 cents at $4.50-1/4 a bushel, after matching Thursday's peak of $4.59-3/4 that was its highest level since mid-June.
All three commodities had earlier reached levels that were hard to justify given current fundamentals, said Arlan Suderman, chief commodities economist at StoneX.
Meanwhile, a spate of farmer selling in the U.S. and South America pressured futures in recent days, Suderman said.
A strong dollar .DXY continued to weigh on wheat in particular, even as the dollar dipped for the day. The greenback had its best weekly performance since early November on expectations that the U.S. economy will continue to outperform its peers globally and U.S. interest rates will remain relatively high in 2025.
Adding pressure to futures, weekly export sales of corn, soybeans and wheat were all below expectations, according to Friday's U.S. Department of Agriculture report.
The government agency reported wheat export sales for the week ended Dec. 26 at 140,600 metric tons, below estimates for 200,000 to 500,000 metric tons, according to a Reuters poll.
It reported 777,000 metric tons of corn sales compared with expectations of 800,000-1,400,000 tons and sales of 484,700 tons of soybeans compared with expectations of 500,000-1,200,000 tons.
Light trade volumes caused price moves to be more dramatic in the days immediately following the New Year's holiday, said Suderman, but he expected volatility to die down when trading resumes on Monday.
(Reporting by Renee Hickman in Chicago, additional reporting by Gus Trompiz in Paris and Naveen Thukral in Singapore; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
((renee.hickman@thomsonreuters.com))
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