Market Matters Blog

When work travel meets personal life travel, everything gets hectic. I spent the first part of last week in Washington for a convention of ag journalists and the April WASDE lock-up. After one short night in Omaha I jumped in a car to drive to Dallas for a wedding.

What I saw driving through Kansas last Thursday amazed me: a thick sheet of ice covering the wheat and trees and fences and electricity lines. It stretched nearly the entire length of Highway 81 from the northern border with Nebraska down to Wichita, except around Salina, where the ice wasn't as thick and had probably melted off. I'll be joining the Wheat Quality Council's annual wheat tour later this month (scouts April 30 to May 2), and it will be interesting to see how much of that wheat had freeze damage or if that ice was the crop's saving grace.

The downside of a hectic travel schedule is that I get more ideas for stories or blogs than I can write -- and information like the size of the ice sheet comes to you days after it happened. Here are just a few of the futures market news items I've been ruminating on:

-- CBOT membership prices spiked before last Wednesday's USDA report. According to one real-time tweet, the price jumped from $288,000 for a full membership to $297,000. I wasn't able to look at the bids and asks that day, but it made me wonder if the price spike was a one-day deal or indicative of a bigger trend. As less and less volume trades in the pits, it seems counterintuitive that membership prices would move substantially higher.

Floor seats are actually cheaper this year than they were at this time in 2011 and 2012. A seat sold on April 11 this year for $295,000; on April 10, 2012 it sold for $310,000. Same story in 2010.

So while memberships had a significant price spike around the report release, it actually supports the trend of more and more trade shifting to the electronic platform.

-- Short-dated new crop options set a new volume record last Monday, cementing its spot as CME's most successful new ag options product launch. Short-dated new crop options are based on the December futures contract but expire in May, July and September, reducing the time value of the option and thereby it's cost.

Volume in short-dated new crop corn options reached a record 7,733 contracts on April 8, surpassing the previous record of 6,505 contracts on January 4, according to a CME press release. Total open interest in corn and soybean short-dated new crop options surpassed 100,000 contracts for the first time.

It's good to see these options catching on; they're practically tailor-made for farmers, especially ones who don't like shelling out a lot of money for a standard December option this early in the planting season. Here's a good resource if you'd like to learn more: http://www.cmegroup.com/…

-- MF Global trustee James Giddens has cut another round of checks to former MF Global customers, bringing MF Global customers with 4d accounts (most farmers and elevators) to 89% whole. The trustee's returned approximately 18% of the 30.7 property (customers who traded on foreign markets).

"This is the maximum amount the Trustee can distribute at this time, pending court approvals and the effectiveness of the agreed upon settlements that are before the courts and may take several months for implementation. The Trustee will distribute as much as possible, as quickly as possible, consistent with the law and the need to reserve for disputed claims," an update on the Trustee's website said.

In other words, keep waiting. I can't help but wonder what will happen first, former customers finally made whole or criminal charges against Jon Corzine and MF Global's leadership.

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