Technical buying and rising concerns about wheat stocks in the Black Sea region provided moderate price gains yesterday after wheat futures suffered heavy losses on Wednesday. In May, the December maturity increased by more than 3%. Institutional investors yesterday bought 3,000 lots of CBoT SRW wheat. Today at 14:30, the USDA publishes weekly US export sales. The hygrometric institute in Moscow estimates the Russian winter wheat harvest 2018 to be 10% lower than the previous year because it is too dry there. The Ukrainian National Weather Service expects the winter wheat crop 2018 to decline from 25.4 million tonnes in 2017 to 24 million tonnes. Extreme temperatures in the spring will therefore have a negative impact on earnings. At the moment the eCBoT is trading with moderate losses. At the Euronext in Paris, the wheat futures were able to compensate for a part of the losses of the previous day and closed with price gains. Egypt has complained about 63,000 tons of wheat from Russia. One study showed that the percentage of ergot was 0.06% higher than the maximum permitted level.At the cash market in Hamburg, the quotations for wheat with 12% protein increased from € 12 to € 8 under Paris Dec. 18.
