weeping in my wine glass

[charliep]

Maybe I'll have a tear in my beer glass tonight at WBGA annual meeting. In a nearby MGE futures contract that continues to fly higher, can't ship wheat across the border to satisfy the shorts in the cash market(wouldn't even want to think what the buy back values are). In old crop months that continue to erode price wise, can't hedge because ______? Will note the contracts are trading so the CWB does have the opportunity to hedge. Would have to follow tom4cwb suggestion of allowing contracting while market is active - not after the close.

[agstar77]

Maybe it was too early to cry, wheat futures back in play . Maybe the top is not in.

[btjadenlepp]

clearly that's not the point.

[agstar77]

Oh, but that is exactly the point. Yours was and is only a guess when to sell, just a more informed guess.

[Lifer]

Agstar is was the right time for him to sell therefore it was the right time. That is the point.

Lepp started this thread therefore his/her point is the point.

I'll just weep in my tupperware cup.

[btjadenlepp]

i don't think you want to get into a contest about who's the best at selling at market highs.

but since you seem to believe that to be the case, let me enlighten you with a quote from the board's own policy department: it was about managing risk.

I completely understand the Board's worries about exposure on Wednesday with pricing this contract. Essentially we both saw the same strong sell signals at the same time, which is why we had a new-crop sale cued up for when the news came in that we couldn't use the contract to manage our own price risk. At that time of day, after the close, we had no alternatives such as putting in orders through a broker, nor could we sell through a private company, most of which offer a similar futures-only contract; in Canada for canola, in the U.S. also for wheat.

So we called one of our U.S. contacts on Tuesday afternoon who handles risk management for private elevators in the U.S. and asked how they were handling the situation. He indicated that since the market was sharply lower, that the buyers would have called their pit trader and determined where the orders could have been filled, then would have offered that level to the farmer. With the market not locked limit down on Tuesday, this was do-able. Furthermore, orders could have been placed by the Board in the overnight session to lay off some of the risk against any Futures Only contracts that we or others might have sent in Tuesday night. In other words, I guess I feel like the Board had alternatives to shutting the program down altogether. For our part, we could have easily stomached a risk premium being applied, as we felt an acute need to manage some downside price risk. But to not be able to access the program altogether was very problematic.

Yes, some Ontario companies did the same thing this week and yes, in this kind of environment private grain buyers can be expected to manage their risk in the same way. But this is not Ontario, where growers have choices about who to sell wheat through - we were totally stuck. It also doesn't help the Board make its oft-touted case that it is somehow better than private multinationals in its dealings with farmers. If you can't do better than their policies during the times farmers most need them, where's the advantage? At the end of the day, the Board wasn't buying what we were selling and in a monopoly environment, in my view anyway, that's a big no-no. Whoever made this decision seems not to have thought through the implications for farmers very carefully; rather, just looked outside the designated area to what was being done elsewhere and bailed on us thinking they'd found an easy way out of the hot seat.

In light of the fact this market volatility doesn't seem to be going anywhere, I wonder what kind of assurance we might be able to get from the Board that this won't happen again, or at least some lead time to deal with it if contracts will need to be pulled. If it's true what they say agstar that you're a director, maybe this is something you can respond to. Understand we put months and months of study and planning into our strategies, which we respectfully incorporate the PPO's into, such that it can throw a major wrench into our clients' operations when things change so suddenly.