EU grains ended narrowly mixed with Nov 12 London wheat down GBP0.35/tonne to close at GBP204.50/tonne and with Nov 12 Paris wheat EUR0.75/tonne firmer at EUR264.50/tonne.
With America closed for the Labor Day holiday, fresh news was hard to come by and volume was light in an extremely dull session.
With the kids going back to school this week, the UK weather is predictably finally improving, which should see the wheat harvest move northwards with significant progress expected by the end of the week.
Hopefully quality will improve, even if optimism isn't too high over yields.
The HGCA noted last week that the poor results seen so far are from a survey "biased towards earlier harvested bread milling wheat, so figures can be expected to change when more nabim group 3 and 4 varieties have been harvested."
Ensus are back up and running and taking in wheat I understand.
Meanwhile, UK on-farm wheat stocks at the end of June were the lowest since 1999/2000, report the HGCA.
Saudi Arabia bought 575 TMT of hard wheat over the weekend, split between European, Australian and "north and south American" origin. It is unclear if by "north American" they mean US or Canadian wheat.
Egypt were also in the market, booking 365 TMT of Russian, Ukraine and Romanian wheat in its largest purchase of the season so far. Russia proved that they aren't out of the market just yet, picking up the lion's share of the order by winning four cargoes worth of the business, whilst Ukraine and Romania picked up one apiece. US wheat proved to be around USD40/tonne too expensive, and that's before more expensive freight is added on top.
Ukraine has had a busy start to the new 2012/13 marketing year, exporting 60% more grain than in the same period last year. They shipped out 1.78 MMT of grain in August, bringing the marketing year-to-date total to a fraction under 3 MMT, including 1.3 MMT of wheat, 1.1 MMT of corn and over 550 TMT of barley.
Ukraine's Ag Ministry forecasts 2012/13 grain exports at around 20 MMT, approximately 8% down on the 21.8 MMT shipped in 2011/12.
There's not much on the agenda this week as far as important data releases are concerned. The USDA's usual weekly crop progress report is delayed until tomorrow night. Next week offers a bit more excitement potential though. The USDA's world supply & demand numbers are out on Wednesday September 12.
Also that day, Germany's Constitutional Court is due to rule on whether the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) is lawful under the German constitution. Morgan Stanley apparently rate the chances of a 'No' verdict as high as 40 percent, according to Reuters. If they did vote against it, that would potentially savage the euro.
