Corn is already ten higher. Gap and crap possibility. Sold 2@ 518
Thanks, tjc!
Likely from the Pro Farmer crop estimates that came out after the close on Friday.
Very bullish corn, and bearish beans. However Pro Farmer usually comes out with a bullish/lower forecast for corn and is wrong much of the time.
Re: Re: Re: Pro Farmer Tour week of 8-17-26
By metmike - Aug. 21, 2026, 2:49 p.m.
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Pro Farmer projects U.S. corn yield at 173.2 bpa, well below USDA’s 180.7. PF corn yield has now come in below USDA in 16 of the last 20 Augusts. The 7.5-bushel PF-USDA shortfall is the largest for August in at least 20 years.
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·8-22-26, metmike: PF has only predicted a higher corn yield vs the USDA 1 time in 20 years, that being in 2021. So they get it right in the years when the USDA was too high and they get it wrong, sometimes REALLY WRONG when the USDA was not high enough in August but PF clearly had a serious bias for estimates that are TOO LOW.
This was the FINAL corn yield the past 3 decades.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php
I did a comparison between final USDA yields and PF yields below and got this.
Year PF forecast compared to final yield
2025 -3.8 bpa
2024 +1.8 bpa
2023 -5.3 bpa
2022 -5.3 bpa
2021 -.3 bpa
2020 -5.8 bpa
2019 -4.2 bpa
2018 -.9 bpa
2017 -8.9 bpa
2016 -1.8 bpa
In 6 out of the last 10 years above(60%), they were more than 3.5 bpa TOO LOW with their final yield estimate. 4 of those times(40%) they were more than 5 bpa TOO LOW.
This year, they are predicting a -7.5 bpa drop in yield compared to the August USDA. They probably have the trend DOWN correct but history and their huge bias for almost always being too low (90% of the time) with their corn yield suggests they are too low again.
Clearly, their crop scouts have a problem with underestimating corn yields!!!! With beans on the other hand they don't appear to have the same bias.
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·8-22-26, metmike: PF has only predicted a higher corn yield vs the USDA 1 time in 20 years, that being in 2021. So they get it right in the years when the USDA was too high and they get it wrong, sometimes REALLY WRONG when the USDA was not high enough in August but PF clearly had a serious bias for estimates that are TOO LOW.
This was the FINAL corn yield the past 3 decades.
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php
I did a comparison between final USDA yields and PF yields below and got this.
Year PF forecast compared to final yield
2025 -3.8 bpa
2024 +1.8 bpa
2023 -5.3 bpa
2022 -5.3 bpa
2021 -.3 bpa
2020 -5.8 bpa
2019 -4.2 bpa
2018 -.9 bpa
2017 -8.9 bpa
2016 -1.8 bpa
In 6 out of the last 10 years above(60%), they were more than 3.5 bpa TOO LOW with their final yield estimate. 4 of those times(40%) they were more than 5 bpa TOO LOW.
This year, they are predicting a -7.5 bpa drop in yield compared to the August USDA. They probably have the trend DOWN correct but history and their huge bias for almost always being too low (90% of the time) with their corn yield suggests they are too low again.
Clearly, their crop scouts have a problem with underestimating corn yields!!!! With beans on the other hand they don't appear to have the same bias.
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Pro Farmer projects U.S. soybean yield at 53.3 bpa, above USDA’s 52.7. PF soybean yield has topped USDA in just 8 of the last 20 Augusts. PF’s 53.3 is its second-highest yield forecast on record, behind 54.9 in 2024.
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8-22-26: metmike: 2 years ago, PF was +.7 bpa HIGHER than the USDA and had their highest/ MOST bearish projection in the last 10 years at 54.9 bpa.
Turns out that the complete opposite happened. We had a dry finish to the growing season with the biggest revision DOWN for the soybean crop in history on the January 2025 USDA report and final yield of just 50.7, so PF was a whopping +4.2 bpa too high!!!!
Their yield forecasts above are just compared to the August crop report NOT the final yield, which is what matters the most. I would be MUCH MORE interested in seeing that metric to see if they got the trend/change in the right direction. In 2024, it was in the WRONG direction and wrong by a lot.
I would be very interested in hearing cutworm's perspective because I have not done a detailed analysis of ALL their work. My intentional cherry picking above was not meant to represent ALL their work, it was in fact intentional based only on the 1 year that stands out because it was such an anomalous outlier NOT a fair assessment of their 10 years above. It was meant only to demonstrate how a crop estimate this late in the season can still be off by 8% and in the WRONG direction.
To be fair, again, it was hot/dry for the last few weeks of the soybean pod filling in 2024 which took away yield AFTER PF did their crop estimate. Even the USDA struggled to get it right as late as the November 2024 crop report!
cutworm, bowyer, jim and others remember exactly because they were following it close!
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By metmike - Aug. 11, 2026, 6:40 p.m.
cutworm,
You and I agree on most things when it comes to markets but on this one we are almost identical.
I still post our comments from late in the 2024 growing season during the flash drought about the crop being negatively impacted. The USDA didn't catch up to that until the January 2025 report!
By metmike - Jan. 10, 2025, noon
EXTREMELY BULLISH!!!!!!!!
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By metmike - Jan. 10, 2025, 12:45 p.m.
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USDA September 12, 2025/Grains
78 responses |
Started by metmike - Sept. 12, 2025, 4:01 p.m.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/114629/
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With that being the case, it's impossible to expect the USDA to dial in recent changes from changing conditions with accuracy.
They have more information than that rest of us and their weekly crop ratings/conditions seem to do a wonderful job at capturing changes from the previous week.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: USDA January 10, 2025
By metmike - Jan. 10, 2025, 12:14 p.m.
U.S. harvested corn area came in above expectations but soybean acres came in below. Both crops saw yield reductions far larger than analysts predicted - both yields were below the range of analyst estimates.
Corn had a bullish upside breakaway gap on the open. It was also a gap to new highs for the move and the year.
The graph below is for the front month, September contract.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/corn
1. 1 week: Bullish upside break away gap higher.
2. 1 month: Bullish upside break away gap higher after steep uptrend.
3. 1 year. Major late June low from intense heat in the northwest Cornbelt. Accelerating uptrend!!! Bullish upside break away gap. Highest price of the year.
4. 10 years: Inverted/inverse head and shoulders bottom, with bottom and 2 shoulders on either side. Was this a break out above the neckline?? Or is there 1 last layer of resistance to overcome???
5. I've been very bullish corn the past 2 months from weather(supply) AND record demand/exports.
IF the gap holds all day I would consider it a measuring gap. The measurement would take dec corn to 560 ish. Which is also resistance from the July 22 continuous chart.
I think that the way to consider the pro tour yield estimates is to see what the market reaction is, in this case bullish price. Also it should be compared to the Aug and Sept USDA reports. Not to final USDA numbers.
We could be getting to 10% carry out, which historically price would be more than $5
Just my 5 cents
Great analysis, cutworm!
Funds came out selling at 8:30 am!
Now eroding the top of the gap for September below but NOT for the new crop December which is the MAIN contract month.
Sept volume is ~69,000
December volume is a whopping ~269,000 just after 9am.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/corn
Update: The graph from this site above has it wrong(which happens a lot but it's a free site to post here). Even in the Sept contract, the top of the gap has held and provided support with no filling.......so far.
Added: SX is getting crushed. -18c
12:45pm: CZ volume is a whopping 423,000 contracts. Sept is and impressive 130,000 contracts.
We couldn't even get down to the top of the gap higher before buyers jumped in just ABOVE the gap. This resulted in a big bounce to new highs for the DAY session but not the NIGHT session, now we are back in the lower half of the range.
Upside exhaustion gaps at a top like this are most powerful when they are filled in the first day after the gap higher. The longer it takes to fill the gap, the less powerful as an exhaustion.
This is why: Today, approaching the top of the gap triggered massive buying that pushed prices to new day session highs. That is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of the buying being exhausted.
That's not saying that the gap will be not be filled tomorrow or some later date. It's saying that this particular formation did NOT serve as a classical "gap and crap" reversal. Things can change with news and the buying can run out at these higher prices and the approach of harvest and actual harvest could cause prices to drop lower than the gap with those items being INDEPENDENT of the gap and crap(failed initially) signal.
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With heat fill and rapid dry down in the South this month, I imagine that harvest will be early and soon.
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We're closing above the open and above the gap higher but in the lower part of the range so something like a surprise bearish crop condition report this afternoon could close the gap on Tuesday/tomorrow..........just like a bullish report could generate more buying. However, as a market gets higher and higher priced, the amount of bullish news needed to generate new buying has to keep EXCEEDING the old news.
Volume today was over 476,000 for just the December contract. I don't follow this metric every day. Maybe cutworm does.
This is the data for TOTAL volume for all contract months (December is easily the highest). It will be interesting to see where today clocks in. For sure at the higher end but not the highest, which was August 12th because of the USDA crop report:
https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/agriculture/grains/corn/volume#tradeDate=20260821
Friday's volume in December corn was 279,000 and pretty active but we blew that away with 476,000 today.
I'm going to guess that total volume was close to 900,000 today and not far below the 931,069 high in volume on August 12th on the bar graph above that only goes back to July 13, 2026.
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As mentioned previously, the source below makes a lot of mistakes when they graph prices but I will correct them verbally.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/corn
1. The low today did NOT get as low as the open and low last night as it shows here.
2. They have a red candle that indicates the close was lower than the open. If this was just the DAY SESSION that would be true. The night session traded almost half the volume and CAN'T be ignored! So their red candle should be a green candle with the bottom of the body being the bottom of the stick/open last night.
Does that matter? You bet it does if you are using candlesticks to graph prices!
The red candle they show looks potentially ominous with a close below the open after a gap higher and partially filling the top of the gap.
The correct green candle, showing the close ABOVE the open and the entire gap holding is not ominous but the close in the bottom half of the range is a potential warning signal of lost momentum.
