@sdelsad/commodity-desk-daily 1.0.63 → 1.0.65

package/ep19.md

@@ -1,283 +0,0 @@
-# Market pulse
-
-**Crude oil ran six dollars in a session and dragged the whole agricultural complex up with it. The export bids at the Gulf did not move a cent.**
-
-| Contract | Last | Change |
-|---|---|---|
-| Dec corn (CBOT) | 533.75 c/bu | +6 |
-| Nov soybeans (CBOT) | 1,332.25 c/bu | +22¾ |
-| Dec Chicago SRW (CBOT) | 741.25 c/bu | +12½ |
-| Dec Kansas City HRW | 818.75 c/bu | +12½ |
-| Dec spring wheat | 762.50 c/bu | +14½ |
-| Oct soybean meal (CBOT) | $350.60/short ton | +5.50 |
-| Oct soybean oil (CBOT) | 71.41 c/lb | +133 pts |
-| Oct WTI crude | $102.06/bbl | +6.00 |
-| Dec Matif milling wheat | €245.25/t | +0.50 |
-
-The bid came from energy. October crude settled above $102 on fighting in the Persian Gulf, and the complex followed it: soybean oil first, because a biodiesel gallon and a diesel gallon compete for the same tank, then beans, then the grains on spillover. China took another 272,000 t of US soybeans, with a further 206,500 t to an unknown buyer, keeping the run of daily flash sales alive. Soybeans are now up on the week; corn and Chicago wheat are still down 7 and 13 cents respectively.
-
-Everything now waits on the USDA supply and demand report at midday New York time. The trade average looks for a corn yield of 178.1 bu/ac against the government's 180.7, production of 15,768 m bu against 16,013, and ending stocks near 1,533 m bu — a cut of about 120 m. On soybeans the estimates are tighter: 52.5 bu/ac against 52.7, and carryout near 289 m bu against 320.
-
-```chart
-{"type":"bar","unit":"% change","title":"Thursday's move started in energy",
- "caption":"Every agricultural contract on the board moved between one and two percent. Crude moved more than six. When the largest bar on the chart is not a crop, the day was not about crops.",
- "source":"CBOT and NYMEX settlements, Thursday 10 September 2026, against Wednesday 9 September",
- "x":["Corn","Beans","Chi wheat","KC wheat","Spring wheat","Bean oil","WTI crude"],
- "series":[{"name":"Session change","values":[1.14,1.74,1.72,1.55,1.94,1.90,6.25]}]}
-```
-
-## The geopolitical read
-
-The Persian Gulf is not a grain story and it does not need to be. It reaches a soybean along three wires, and only one of them is the one everybody watches.
-
-The first is substitution in the oil share. Vegetable oil is a fuel as well as a food, and a crude price above $100 lifts the ceiling on what a biodiesel plant can pay for a tonne of soybean oil. That wire is fast and it is visible: oil led the complex on Thursday.
-
-The second is freight. A Panamax burns bunkers and a barge burns diesel, and both costs are rebilled into the cost of moving a cargo from where it was grown to where it was sold. That wire runs into the arb, not the flat price.
-
-The third is war-risk premium on hulls, quoted per voyage rather than per tonne. It lands on whichever routing passes the risk, and the practical effect is to make one origin more expensive than another for reasons that have nothing to do with the crop in either.
-
-Meanwhile the Black Sea kept doing the opposite of what its news flow implies. Russian wheat eased to around $210/t even with September loadings running roughly 1 Mt behind the 4.6 Mt of a year ago, and even after strikes on Novorossiysk, on Nika-Tera at Mykolaiv and on Makhachkala in Dagestan inside twenty-four hours. Damaged capacity has been in the price for weeks. What has not been in the price is a buyer who cannot find the tonnes, and until one appears the assessment drifts down.
-
-# Key takeaways
-
-- Basis is made of four things — freight, farmer selling, end demand and space. None of them is a view on price, which is why a basis trader and a flat-price trader can look at the same screen and disagree about nothing.
-- A hedged merchant's P&L has three buckets: flat price, basis and the calendar. Flat price is structurally the empty one, and if it is not empty the hedge was wrong.
-- The market never pays the full cost of carry. Whatever the roll does not cover, the basis has to earn.
-- Every farmer contract is a decision about which of the two prices to keep. The elevator ends up owning the other one, and its book is the sum of those transfers.
-- Farm selling clusters on the calendar and on round numbers, and that clustering is invisible on a global screen. It shows up in the posted bid, which is why basis is the better read on what the countryside is doing.
-- A bid contains an unprinted credit spread and an unprinted quality spread. Two neighbours can be quoted four cents apart on identical corn and both bids can be right.
-
-# Vocabulary
-
-| Term | What it means |
-|---|---|
-| **Origination** | The business of buying physical crop from farmers, co-ops and country elevators, and the network of people and facilities that makes it possible |
-| **Posted bid** | The price an elevator displays to growers for immediate delivery, quoted as a differential to a named futures month and used to manage the delivery queue as much as to set a price |
-| **Basis contract** | A farmer contract that fixes the differential now and leaves the futures price to be set later, before a deadline |
-| **Hedge-to-arrive (HTA)** | The mirror image: the futures price is fixed now and the differential is set later |
-| **Deferred price (DP) contract** | A delivery in which title passes with no price set at all, leaving the farmer an unsecured creditor of the elevator until he prices |
-| **Minimum price contract** | A cash sale bundled with a bought call, giving the seller a floor and retained upside in exchange for a fee |
-| **Long the basis** | Owning physical hedged with futures, so the position gains when the differential strengthens and is indifferent to the board |
-| **Roll return** | The gain or loss taken when a hedge is moved from one futures month to the next — positive for a short hedger in a carry market |
-| **Basis push** | A temporary improvement in the posted bid, used to pull grain out of farm storage when a buyer needs tonnes quickly |
-| **Harvest run** | The six to eight weeks in which a full year of crop arrives at facilities sized to ship it over twelve months |
-| **Price-later deadline** | The date by which an unpriced farmer contract must be fixed, after which the buyer prices it at the market |
-
-# Quiz
-
-**Q1.** A merchant originates 30,000 t of soybeans in Iowa in October. He buys them at November minus 55, with November futures at 1,332.25, and hedges immediately in November Chicago. In late October he rolls the hedge into January, and the November/January spread is 12 cents of carry. In January he sells the beans to a crusher at January plus 10, prices them with January futures at 1,368.00, and lifts the hedge. Carrying costs run 4.5 c/bu per month for three months, plus interest at 5 percent on the purchase price for three months.
-
-Work out the size in bushels and in lots, split the gross margin into its flat-price, basis and calendar components, reconcile that split against the actual cash and futures ledgers to the dollar, and give the net result.
-
-**Q2.** A farmer signs a basis contract in October: he fixes the basis at 35 under December, delivers the corn, and leaves the futures price open until February. Which of the two risks does the elevator now carry?
-
-**Q3.** A Chicago wheat short standing into first notice day can make grain deliverable for 22 cents, roll for 34, or buy back for 41. Which of those three costs sets the ceiling on how far the front month can be squeezed?
-
-**Q4.** A calendar spread has a hard ceiling but no floor — it cannot widen indefinitely, yet nothing stops it inverting. What creates the ceiling?
-
-**Q5 — conversion drill.** A Brazilian model puts 85 mm of rain on central Mato Grosso in the planting window. How many inches is that?
-
----
----
----
-
-# SOLUTIONS (spoilers)
-
-**A1.** Five steps, and the discipline is to keep the differential and the board in separate columns from the first line to the last.
-
-*Size.* 30,000 t × 36.744 = 1,102,320 bushels. At 5,000 bushels a lot that is 220.46, so the hedge is 220 lots — 1,100,000 bushels. He owns 2,320 bushels more beans than he is short. One cent on 220 lots is $11,000.
-
-*The two ledgers.*
-
-| | c/bu |
-|---|---|
-| Cash bought, November 1,332.25 less 55 | 1,277.25 |
-| Cash sold, January 1,368.00 plus 10 | 1,378.00 |
-| **Cash gain** | **+100.75** |
-
-On the futures he sold November at 1,332.25, bought it back and sold January 12 cents higher at the roll, then bought January back at 1,368.00. Whatever the November price was on the day he rolled, it cancels: the futures result is 1,332.25 + 12.00 − 1,368.00 = **−23.75 c/bu**.
-
-| | Bushels | c/bu | Result |
-|---|---|---|---|
-| Cash | 1,102,320 | +100.75 | +$1,110,587.40 |
-| Futures | 1,100,000 | −23.75 | −$261,250.00 |
-| **Gross** | | | **+$849,337.40** |
-
-*The three buckets.*
-
-| Bucket | c/bu | Where it came from |
-|---|---|---|
-| Flat price | 0.00 | Hedged from purchase to sale |
-| Basis | +65.00 | Bought 55 under, sold 10 over |
-| Calendar | +12.00 | Short hedger rolling in a carry market |
-| **Total** | **+77.00** | |
-
-*The reconciliation.* 77.00 cents on 1,102,320 bushels is $848,786.40, which is $551.00 short of the ledgers. That gap is not rounding. He hedged 1,100,000 bushels against 1,102,320 of beans, so 2,320 bushels rode the board unhedged through a 23.75-cent rally: 2,320 × $0.2375 = $551.00 exactly. The decomposition is the trade. The difference is the lot size.
-
-*The bill and the net.*
-
-| | c/bu |
-|---|---|
-| Storage, 4.5 × 3 months | 13.50 |
-| Interest, $12.7725 at 5% for 3 months | 15.97 |
-| **Total cost** | **29.47** |
-
-29.47 cents on 1,102,320 bushels is $324,853.70. Net: **$524,483.70**.
-
-*The trap.* The board rallied hard across this trade — from a November at 1,332.25 to a January at 1,368.00 — and it contributed nothing at all. A merchant who reported this as "we made five hundred grand because beans went up" would be describing a trade he did not do. He made it because he bought 55 under and sold 10 over, and because the carry market paid him 12 cents to be patient.
-
-**A2.** The basis. The farmer has kept the flat price.
-
-Reading a farmer contract is always the same exercise: there are two prices on every bushel, and the contract says which one each party is keeping. Here the differential is struck at 35 under and never moves again. The elevator takes title, sells futures against the corn, and is therefore long the basis at minus 35 — it profits if the local market firms toward the board and loses if it weakens further. The farmer keeps an open futures price and all the board risk that comes with it, until he fixes or the deadline fixes him.
-
-Notice the asymmetry in who is comfortable. The elevator has just acquired the risk it is professionally equipped to carry, because basis is what it trades all year and it has the space, the freight and the customers to work the position. The farmer has kept the risk that is genuinely a coin toss. Both parties have moved toward the exposure they understand, which is why the contract exists.
-
-**A3.** The 22 cents — the cost of making grain deliverable.
-
-A squeeze is never a contest about world supply. It is a contest about tonnes that can physically be certificated at a delivery point before the clock runs out, and the shorts collectively pay whichever exit is cheapest. As long as there is time to buy cash wheat, ship it to a regular warehouse and have certificates issued, nobody rationally pays 41 to buy back what they could cover for 22. That 22 is the ceiling.
-
-The ceiling fails on the calendar rather than on the arithmetic. Load-out capacity, barge and rail availability and the certificate-issuing process all take days the shorts may no longer have, and the nearer first notice day comes, the less of the cheap route is actually available. What a squeeze harvests is not the difference between 22 and 41. It is the difference between 22 and 41 multiplied by the number of shorts who left it too late.
-
-**A4.** The arbitrage of buying the cheap month, storing the grain and delivering it against the dear one.
-
-If the spread between two months ever exceeds the true cost of carrying grain between them — storage plus interest plus handling — anyone with bin space can buy the near month, take delivery, store, and deliver against the far month for a riskless margin. That trade is available to the whole market, so the spread is arbitraged back to full carry and cannot go further. Full carry is a ceiling because storing grain is something you can always choose to do.
-
-There is no floor because the mirror trade does not exist. To profit from an inverse you would have to deliver grain now and take it back later, and nobody can borrow grain out of next March. So when the market wants tonnes immediately, the inverse can widen as far as urgency pushes it. One direction is bounded by a physical action anybody can take, the other is bounded only by how badly someone needs the crop today.
-
-**A5 — conversion drill.** Divide by 25 for the quick version: 85 ÷ 25 = **3.4 inches**. Exact: 85 ÷ 25.4 = **3.35 inches**.
-
-The shortcut runs about 1.6 percent high, which is harmless here. It stops being harmless when the number is a threshold rather than a quantity — a forecast that reads "three and a half inches" in one system and "under 85 mm" in the other is the same weekend of rain described twice, and a desk that treats them as two confirmations of a wet planting window has counted one forecast as two.
-
-# The written edition
-
-## Two numbers, one day
-
-On Thursday November soybeans rose 22¾ cents. The Gulf export bid for soybeans stayed exactly where it had been the day before, at 100 to 102 over November. Corn rose 6 cents; the Gulf corn bid stayed at 60 to 66 over December.
-
-Nothing about the export business changed on Thursday. What changed was the number every screen displays.
-
-Meanwhile something that does matter to the export business moved a great deal, and it moved without a headline. USDA's barge freight index for the week ended 9 September came in at 250.44 against 221.70 the week before — a jump of almost 13 percent in seven days, with truck, rail and ocean all rising behind it. That is the cost of physically moving grain from the middle of the country to a vessel, and it is the single largest component of what a farmer in Iowa is paid.
-
-```chart
-{"type":"bar","unit":"index","title":"Every mode got more expensive",
- "caption":"Barge rates jumped nearly thirteen percent in a single week as harvest movement began, with every other mode rising behind them. None of this appears in a futures price. All of it appears in the bid a farmer is quoted.",
- "source":"USDA AMS grain transportation cost indicators, weeks ended 2 and 9 September 2026",
- "x":["Barge","Truck","Shuttle rail","Gulf vessel","Pacific vessel"],
- "series":[{"name":"Week to 2 Sep","values":[221.70,211,132,189.42,175.77]},
-           {"name":"Week to 9 Sep","values":[250.44,225,136,193.87,178.15]}]}
-```
-
-## What basis is actually made of
-
-Four things, and not one of them is an opinion about where prices are going.
-
-**Freight** is the first and the largest. The differential is the price of moving *this* grain from *here* to wherever the futures contract lives. Raise the barge rate and every bushel upriver is worth less this afternoon than it was this morning, with the board unchanged.
-
-**Farmer selling** is the second. Grain that has been sold is grain in the pipe. Grain still sitting in a bin is a promise, and promises do not load vessels.
-
-**End demand** is the third — an exporter with a vessel to fill or a crush plant short of beans bids the local market up until the grain comes, and stops when it has enough.
-
-**Space** is the fourth: bin space, barge slots, rail sets, elevator legs. When the pipe is full, the bid falls until somebody stops delivering. It is a queue-management price rather than a valuation.
-
-What is absent from that list is everything the financial press treats as the market. Argentine weather, fund positioning, a report at lunchtime: those move the board, and the board is a global number. Basis is a local one. The two argue with each other all day, and the argument is where a merchant's money is.
-
-## Three buckets, and one of them is always empty
-
-Take a finished trade, start to finish.
-
-In October a merchant buys 1,000,000 bushels of corn from farmers in central Illinois at December minus 35. December is at 533.75, so he pays 498.75 a bushel. He sells 200 December lots against it the same afternoon — 1,000,000 bushels at 5,000 to a lot — and from that moment he does not care what corn is worth.
-
-In late November he rolls the hedge from December into March. The market is paying 14 cents of carry, and he is short: he buys December back and sells March 14 cents higher, collecting the difference. In February he sells the corn to an ethanol plant at March plus 5 and buys his futures back.
-
-Where did the money come from?
-
-| Bucket | c/bu | |
-|---|---|---|
-| Flat price | 0 | Hedged throughout |
-| Basis | +40 | Bought 35 under, sold 5 over |
-| Calendar | +14 | The roll, in a carry market |
-| **Gross** | **+54** | $540,000 on a million bushels |
-| Storage, 4c × 4 months | −16 | |
-| Interest, 5% on $4.9875 for 4 months | −8.31 | |
-| **Net** | **+29.69** | **$296,900** |
-
-```chart
-{"type":"waterfall","unit":"c/bu","title":"Where a merchant's corn margin comes from",
- "caption":"Flat price contributes a bar of zero height. That is not a rounding — it is the entire purpose of the hedge, and it means the trade lives or dies on the two bars beside it.",
- "source":"Worked example, episode 19 — 1,000,000 bu of central Illinois corn, October to February",
- "steps":[{"label":"Basis","value":40,"kind":"base"},
-          {"label":"Calendar roll","value":14},
-          {"label":"Flat price","value":0},
-          {"label":"Storage","value":-16},
-          {"label":"Interest","value":-8.31},
-          {"label":"Net","kind":"total"}]}
-```
-
-### The part worth sitting with
-
-The market paid him 14 cents of carry for the December-to-March period. His own cost of carrying for those three months was about 18.23 cents — 12 of storage and 6.23 of interest. The carry covered roughly three quarters of what storage actually cost him.
-
-That relationship is not an accident of this example. A calendar spread that traded at genuine full carry would be handing free money to anyone with a bin, so the market prices it below. Episode 16 put Chicago Dec/March wheat at 46 percent of full carry; this corn market is paying closer to 77 percent, which is a strong carry and a very different instruction. Either way the number is less than 100.
-
-So the storage half of the business never pays for itself. Whatever the roll does not cover, the basis has to earn. That is not a footnote to the job. It is the job.
-
-## Origination: the half that cannot be bought
-
-The grain has to come from somewhere, and in North America it comes from several hundred thousand people who each own a small amount of it and none of whom have to sell today.
-
-A farmer does not simply sell corn. He chooses which of two prices to keep, because every bushel carries exactly two: the board and the basis.
-
-| Contract | Board | Basis | What the elevator ends up holding |
-|---|---|---|---|
-| Cash sale | Fixed | Fixed | Hedged grain, clean |
-| Forward cash | Fixed | Fixed | The same, earlier |
-| Basis contract | Open | Fixed | Long the basis, and a pricing deadline to police |
-| Hedge-to-arrive | Fixed | Open | A fixed futures price against an unknown local market |
-| Deferred price | Open | Open | Title to the grain and an unsecured payable |
-| Minimum price | Floored | Fixed | A hedged position plus an option it has to manage |
-
-Read the table as a list of transfers. Every row moves one of the two risks across the counter, and the elevator's book at the end of harvest is simply the sum of what the neighbourhood decided to hand over.
-
-Here is how one of them sounds.
-
-> **FARMER:** What's your October?
-> **ORIGINATOR:** Thirty-five under December. Same as yesterday.
-> **FARMER:** I'll take the thirty-five. Leave the board open.
-> **ORIGINATOR:** Basis contract then. You price it by the twentieth of February, or I price it for you.
-> **FARMER:** Fine.
-
-Five lines, and a real trade. The farmer has sold the hardest part of his year — the harvest basis, at its seasonal worst — and kept the part he believes he can win. The elevator now owns corn at a fixed 35 under, a hedge to place before the close, and a deadline it will have to chase him about in February.
-
-### Why the deadline is in there
-
-An unpriced contract is a credit exposure wearing a marketing costume. On a deferred price contract it is explicit: the farmer has handed over title and taken no money, which makes him an unsecured creditor of a business with thin margins and a large revolving loan. On an HTA it runs the other way — the elevator has a fixed futures price against a basis that has not been agreed, and if the local market collapses it is the elevator holding a price it cannot get.
-
-That is not theoretical. In 1996 a violent inversion in the corn market left large numbers of farmers holding hedge-to-arrive contracts against a nearby month that had run far above the deferred ones. Rolling those contracts forward, which had always been routine, suddenly cost more than a dollar a bushel. Some elevators absorbed it, some could not, and the affair ended in years of litigation and a long regulatory argument about whether an HTA was a cash contract at all. The mechanism that caused it was entirely ordinary: a contract that leaves one leg open is a position, and a position has to be managed by whoever is left holding it.
-
-## Why farm selling clusters, and where the cluster lands
-
-Farm selling is not smooth and never has been. It clusters on round numbers — six dollars on corn pulls out grain that five ninety could not. It clusters on cash-flow dates: land rent, input prepay, the week before the tax year turns. It clusters hardest of all on the day the bin is full and the combine is still running, because that seller has no choice at all.
-
-Now ask where twenty thousand simultaneous sell decisions actually show up.
-
-Not in the futures price. Chicago is pricing a world crop against world demand, and a heavy morning in one river district is a rounding error against that. The grain has to be absorbed locally, by elevators with finite space and finite freight, and their only tool is the bid. So they drop it — not to value the corn differently, but to slow the queue at the scale.
-
-The whole effect lands on the basis. Which is why an experienced originator watches the posted bids up and down the river rather than the screen when he wants to know what the countryside is doing. The board tells him what the world thinks. The basis tells him what his neighbours did this morning.
-
-The same mechanism runs in reverse, and has a name: a **basis push**. An exporter who is suddenly short tonnes against a vessel raises the bid a few cents for a week to pull grain out of farm storage. He is not revaluing corn. He is paying for delivery speed, and he will take it away again the moment his boat is full.
-
-## Relationships as infrastructure
-
-One last thing, and it is the part that never gets written down.
-
-The same corn does not fetch the same bid from the same elevator on the same morning. Two farmers in one county, identical grain, quoted four cents apart — and both bids are correct.
-
-A bid to a stranger has to carry things a bid to a twenty-year counterparty does not:
-
-- **An unknown quality distribution.** A known grower's corn has a known moisture and test-weight history, so the discount-schedule risk is priced. An unknown one's is a guess, and guesses get a margin.
-- **An unknown delivery record.** A farmer who shows up on the day he said is worth real money when there is a vessel on a laytime clock and demurrage running.
-- **An unknown answer to the only question that matters in a fast market:** who walks away from a contract when the price moves against them? A counterparty with thirty years of never washing out is cheaper to trade with than any credit file will admit.
-
-That is a credit spread and a quality spread, both sitting inside a differential, neither of them printed anywhere. It is also the honest reason origination relationships are infrastructure rather than sentiment: they are the cheapest form of credit analysis anyone has yet found, and they take a generation to build and one harvest to destroy.
-
-It is also why origination capacity — the sites, the trucks, the people who know which farms combine early — is the asset that actually constrains a merchant. Anyone can rent a vessel. Nobody can rent a relationship with four hundred farmers in a draw area, which is why the firms that own that network trade the volumes they do.

package/ep19.script.txt

@@ -1,96 +0,0 @@
-Yesterday soybeans rallied twenty-two and three quarter cents. ||| 0.4
-The export bid at the Gulf did not move at all. ||| 0.5
-One of those two numbers is the market. The other one is the business. ||| 0.7
-This is Soft Commodity Trading, episode nineteen. Today, what basis is actually made of, and how a merchant buys grain from the people who grow it. ||| 0.8
-Thursday's tape first. ||| 0.4
-December corn settled at five thirty-three and three quarters, up six cents. ||| 0.35
-November soybeans at thirteen thirty-two and a quarter, up twenty-two and three quarters. ||| 0.35
-December Chicago wheat at seven forty-one and a quarter, up twelve and a half. Kansas City eight eighteen and three quarters. Minneapolis seven sixty-two and a half. ||| 0.5
-The move did not start in grain. ||| 0.4
-October crude oil settled above a hundred and two dollars, up six dollars in one session, on fighting in the Persian Gulf. ||| 0.45
-Soybean oil followed it up a hundred and thirty-three points. Meal added five dollars fifty. China bought another two hundred and seventy-two thousand tonnes of American beans. ||| 0.6
-Here is the transmission, because crude does not reach a soybean directly. It reaches it three ways. ||| 0.4
-Through vegetable oil, where a biodiesel gallon competes with a diesel gallon. ||| 0.35
-Through freight, because a ship burns bunkers and a barge burns diesel. ||| 0.35
-And through war-risk premium on hulls, which is quoted per voyage and lands on the arb long before it lands on the flat price. ||| 0.6
-In the Black Sea, Russian wheat eased to around two hundred and ten dollars a tonne, even with September loadings running about a million tonnes behind last year, and even after strikes on Novorossiysk, Nika-Tera and Makhachkala inside twenty-four hours. ||| 0.5
-Everything now waits on the U S D A supply and demand report at midday New York time. ||| 0.4
-The trade is looking for a corn yield near a hundred and seventy-eight bushels an acre, against the government's hundred and eighty point seven, and ending stocks near one point five three billion bushels. ||| 0.6
-But here is what actually matters about yesterday for today's subject. ||| 0.4
-Beans rallied twenty-two and three quarter cents. The Gulf export bid stayed exactly where it was, a hundred over November. ||| 0.45
-Corn rallied six. The Gulf corn bid stayed sixty to sixty-six over December. ||| 0.5
-Meanwhile the cost of actually moving the grain moved hard. The barge freight index went from two twenty-one point seven to two fifty point four in a single week. ||| 0.5
-The screen moved and the business did not. The business moved and the screen never noticed. ||| 0.7
-So what is basis actually made of? ||| 0.5
-Four things. None of them is an opinion about price. ||| 0.4
-Freight is the first and the largest. ||| 0.35
-Basis is the price of getting this grain, from here, to where the contract lives. Raise the barge rate and every bushel upriver is worth less today than it was yesterday. ||| 0.5
-Second, farmer selling. Grain that has been sold is grain in the pipe. Grain that is still in a bin is a promise. ||| 0.45
-Third, export and processor demand. Somebody at the end of the pipe either wants this grain now, or does not. ||| 0.4
-Fourth, space. Bin space, barge space, rail sets, elevator legs. When the pipe is full, the bid falls until somebody stops delivering. ||| 0.6
-Notice what is missing from that list. ||| 0.4
-The weather in Argentina. The funds. The report at lunchtime. ||| 0.45
-Those move the board. The board is a global number. Basis is a local one, and the two argue with each other constantly. ||| 0.7
-Now the part that pays. Separating basis profit from flat price profit. ||| 0.5
-Take a real trade, start to finish. ||| 0.35
-In October a merchant buys a million bushels of corn from farmers in central Illinois. ||| 0.35
-He pays December minus thirty-five. December is five thirty-three seventy-five, so he pays four ninety-eight seventy-five a bushel. ||| 0.45
-He immediately sells two hundred December lots against it. A million bushels, five thousand to a lot. He is hedged the same afternoon. ||| 0.5
-In late November he rolls that hedge from December into March, and the market is paying fourteen cents of carry. ||| 0.4
-He is short. He buys back December and sells March fourteen cents higher. He collects the fourteen. ||| 0.5
-In February he sells the corn to an ethanol plant at March plus five, and buys his futures back. ||| 0.5
-Now. Where did the money come from? ||| 0.5
-Three buckets, and only three. ||| 0.4
-Bucket one, flat price. Zero. ||| 0.4
-Not small. Zero. Every bushel was hedged from the hour he bought it. The board can do whatever it likes and it changes nothing. ||| 0.6
-Bucket two, basis. He bought at thirty-five under and sold at five over. That is forty cents. ||| 0.5
-Bucket three, the calendar. The roll paid him fourteen. ||| 0.45
-Forty plus fourteen is fifty-four cents on a million bushels. Five hundred and forty thousand dollars, gross. ||| 0.6
-Then the bill arrives. Four months of commercial storage at four cents a month is sixteen cents. Four months of interest on five dollars of corn, at five percent, is another eight and a third. ||| 0.5
-Twenty-four and a third cents of cost against fifty-four of gross. He keeps just under thirty. ||| 0.6
-Sit with that for a second, because there is something in it. ||| 0.4
-The market paid him fourteen cents of carry for three months. His actual cost of carrying for those three months was about eighteen. ||| 0.5
-The carry covered roughly three quarters of the cost of storage. It never covers all of it. ||| 0.45
-Which means the basis has to earn the rest. That is not a detail. That is the job description. ||| 0.7
-Now the other half. Where does the grain come from in the first place? ||| 0.5
-Origination. The unglamorous half of a merchant, and the half that is genuinely hard to replace. ||| 0.4
-A farmer does not simply sell corn. He chooses which of two risks to keep. ||| 0.5
-Because every load of grain carries exactly two prices. The board, and the basis. ||| 0.45
-A cash sale gives away both. Done, finished, cheque in the post. ||| 0.4
-A basis contract gives away the basis and keeps the board. The farmer fixes thirty-five under today, delivers the grain, and prices the futures whenever he likes before a deadline. ||| 0.55
-A hedge-to-arrive is the exact mirror. He fixes the futures and keeps the basis open. ||| 0.5
-And deferred pricing gives away neither, and gives away something worse. He delivers the grain, transfers title, sets no price at all, and becomes an unsecured creditor of the elevator. ||| 0.6
-Listen to how that gets done. ||| 0.5
-FARMER: What's your October? ||| 0.25
-ORIGINATOR: Thirty-five under December. Same as yesterday. ||| 0.25
-FARMER: I'll take the thirty-five. Leave the board open. ||| 0.25
-ORIGINATOR: Basis contract then. You price it by the twentieth of February or I price it for you. ||| 0.25
-FARMER: Fine. ||| 0.6
-Four lines, and a real trade. ||| 0.4
-He just sold the hardest part of his year, the harvest basis, and kept the part he believes he can win. ||| 0.45
-And the elevator now owns a million bushels of thirty-five under corn, a hedge to place, and a deadline it has to police. ||| 0.6
-Which brings us to why farmers sell when they sell. ||| 0.5
-Farm selling clusters. It always has. ||| 0.4
-It clusters on round numbers, on the day the land rent is due, on the week before tax year end, and above all on the day the bin is full and the combine is still running. ||| 0.55
-And here is the point. That clustering does not show up in the futures price. ||| 0.45
-Twenty thousand farmers deciding to sell on the same morning is invisible on a global screen. ||| 0.4
-It shows up in one place only. The elevator drops its bid to slow the queue, and the basis takes the whole blow. ||| 0.6
-Which is why an experienced originator reads basis, not price, to know what the countryside is doing. ||| 0.7
-One last thing, and it is the thing nobody writes down. ||| 0.5
-The same corn does not fetch the same bid from the same elevator on the same morning. ||| 0.45
-Two farmers, one county, identical corn. Four cents apart. And both bids are correct. ||| 0.55
-Because a bid to a stranger has to carry things a bid to a twenty-year counterparty does not. ||| 0.45
-An unknown quality distribution, which is a discount schedule risk. ||| 0.35
-An unknown delivery record, which is worth real money when there is a vessel on a laytime clock. ||| 0.4
-And an unknown answer to the only question that matters in a fast market. Who walks away from a contract when the price moves against them? ||| 0.6
-That is a credit spread, and it is inside the basis, and it is never printed. ||| 0.5
-Which is the honest reason relationships in origination are infrastructure and not sentiment. They are the cheapest form of credit analysis anybody has ever found. ||| 0.8
-So, what to keep. ||| 0.5
-Basis is freight, farmer selling, end demand and space. It is not a view. ||| 0.45
-A hedged merchant's profit and loss has three buckets, and flat price is always the empty one. ||| 0.45
-The market never pays the full cost of carry, so the basis has to earn the difference. ||| 0.45
-Every farmer contract is a decision about which of two risks to keep, and the elevator ends up holding the other one. ||| 0.45
-And farm selling clusters, which is why the basis, not the screen, is where the countryside becomes visible. ||| 0.7
-Monday, the far end of the pipe. How large importers actually buy, how a tender is priced backwards from the destination, and the arithmetic of deciding to store rather than sell. ||| 0.5
-The notes carry four questions, a full decomposition to work through, and the solutions. ||| 0.4
-Thanks for listening. ||| 0.6

package/release.json

@@ -1,70 +0,0 @@
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