The balance of  margin accounts

What I went wrong

I anticipate the price will increase due to shortage of corn supply.  The article supports that the amounts of corn harvested have reduced by 13% in the drought condition in U.S. In addition to the decreasing the supplied quantity of corn, I assume that the higher willingness to buy corn tends to increase price. It is because consumers are likely to hoarding up corn in order to prepare shortage of corn.

I thought the first contract price such as C2Z is more likely to be affected by today’s bad weather compared to next contract C3H. By the time March 2013, many food suppliers would have sufficient stockpile of corn, which means there would be not much increasing in demand of corn. So I expected that the price of C3H is stable or decreasing. Overall I expect that decreasing supplied corn and increasing demanded corn lead to higher price of C2Z. However, the price of C2Z is decreasing.

As well I make a mistake to do offset. Even though I know the concept of offset, taking position opposite to initial position on the same date, I miss the part of ‘on the same date’. What I have done is buying C2Z expected to be higher price, and selling C3H expected to be lower price. I thought I offset the contract as long as I have opposite decision on the same commodity. But it means I have two on-going contracts. After realizing that, I sell C2Z and buy C3Z in order to end my contracts. Luckily my total gain is 460.50.

The Road Ahead

I will do offset properly for the next trade. I will take opposite position on the same quantity, commodity, and date. From my last record, the corn prices have been decreasing during a week. I will choose short position for the corn next week regardless of wheather condition.  While I am looking for why the contract price of C2Z keeps decreasing, I found an article. It states some parts of Iowa and Minnesota enjoy better-than-expected yields. It could somehow support that the reason why the price of corn would decrease.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578002130070385440.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

From the next week trade, I am looking for trading other commodity market such as wheat. I think I go with long (buy) of wheat. I read an article. It explains the current situation in Russia, the third-largest wheat exporter. According to Economy Minister Andrei Belousov, the price of wheat is expected to increase.   What happens in Russia is that the country restricts the amount of wheat to export in order to protect domestic wheat market.  The article explains that Russia used to export 18.56 million tons a year when there is free trade, but it reduced to 3.98 million tons in the 2010-11 after applying export restriction. And 8 million tons of wheat is expected to export from Russia in the 2012-13.  Such export quotas result in shortage in world supply and increasing the price of wheat contract in Chicago board. Thus I will buy wheat.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-21/russia-may-curb-grains-exports-to-control-domestic-prices

Cool Source of Information

1)      http://www.cmegroup.com/

This GME group website helps manage risk on a daily basis. The chart shows the basis, which is the difference between yesterday’s contracted price and today contracted’ price.  Suppose I am long position with C2Z. From the website, its change value of C2Z is +2.4 on Sep 18^th, and it becomes +2.0 on Sep 19^th. This refers that I lose profits of 0.4. It is just one of ways to predict future contract price.

2)      http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome

This website gives the brief explanation of commodity market.  For example, I can get brief information about wheat market in U.S.  The United States is a main country to produce wheat. However, the wheat harvested areas have decreased since 1981. It is because farmers who harvest other crops instead of wheat can get higher profits. As well this website shows numeric data. For example, in the section of U.S. Acreage, Production, Yield, and Farm Price, I could find that US harvested wheat area (million hectares) tends to gradually decrease during 10 years from 222.061 to 218.849, but the yield (metric tons per hectare) has been increasing from 2.53 to 3.03. One possibility to explain the numeric results is that the technology innovation allows farmers to increase yield of wheat.