The financial markets had a horrible day yesterday. There’s no way of sugarcoating it. The Dow closed below 11,900 and both the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 ended about 1.75% lower.
Know what started to climb in after-hours trading?
Grains… Agricultural commodities like corn, wheat and soybeans. This is good news for grains. They had been sliding for a number of days because of lower energy costs. Some stabilization could mean investments in grains are in for a bounce.
I do think corn and wheat will climb from here. Jack Scoville of Price Futures Group is predicting tight corn supplies by September, and that the USDA will need to lower production estimates for wheat.
This news hasn’t filtered down yet.
Two Agricultural Commodities Investments
You may remember me talking about two agricultural investments back in January… The iPath Dow Jones UBS Grains ETN (JJG:NYSE) and the PowerShares DB Agriculture ETF (DBA:NYSE). Both invest in agricultural commodity futures. The JJG was focused on grains exclusively, but the DBA can hold lots of different agricultural commodities.
Right now, the majority of DBA is made up of coffee futures. This isn’t the same mix as when we first talked about DBA, and the ETF is down almost 5%.
It might be time to take this money off the table.
But JJG is a different story.
As of May 31, 2011, this was JJG’s portfolio:
JJG is also down since January — about 4%. But if grains get a bounce here, and grain prices start climbing, this is the investment you want to be holding, rather than DBA.
But here’s the thing to watch. JJG’s chart looks a lot like a futures chart for soybeans. Take a look.
Here’s JJG:
And here’s a chart for soybean futures:
Soybeans have been swinging back and forth for the past six months. One of the reasons for this has been low demand from the investment sector in favor of higher corn investments.
What this means for JJG is that any momentum from a jump in corn has been hampered by waffling soybean prices. On June 30, the USDA will release its Quarterly Stocks and Acreage update. That report could have an impact on where soybeans head from here.
Until then, we’re going to keep JJG on our list unless we see its share price drop to $51. At that point we’ll reevaluate.
Editor’s Note: I want to issue a correction from Monday’s article. Our topic was the OPEC meeting and the in-fighting between some members. Notably, Saudi Arabia and Iran. But Iran wasn’t acting against Saudi Arabia alone. Other OPEC countries in the region were also standing against Saudi Arabia’s call for increased crude oil production.
But in my article, I lumped Iran in with the Arab countries that voted against higher crude oil quotas. An email from Smart Investing Daily reader M.F. brought this to my attention. Iran is not an Arab nation — it’s Persian. I apologize for the mistake. Thank you to the reader who wrote in.
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