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Market analyst celebrates market’s response to Thursday’s reports

The market’s reaction to Thursday’s USDA crop production and stocks report left some analysts scratching their heads.

But for analyst Darin Newsom, it was a cause for celebration.

“It was actually a great day. It was a great reaction to the foolishness of USDA,” Newsom says. “It was actually a lot of fun to watch.”

Newsom, a long-time critic of USDA reports, says the fact that large investment groups are now relying on their own private research, and ignoring USDA data, is a good thing.

“These large funds, these large investment groups, are getting this data—the satellite imagery, the drone imagery, the up-to-the-second data about what acres really are, about what yield really could be,” Newsom says. “And all the nonsense that USDA sends out that’s just pretend, make-believe numbers, they (the funds) don’t even pay attention to that because they have up-to-the-second data—the very latest.”

Newsom says he doesn’t buy the argument that farmers will be in the dark without USDA data.

“The hue and cry will be, ‘well, we don’t know the numbers’,” Newsom says. “We don’t need to know the numbers. What difference does it make to us? The only thing that matters to us, as farmers and those in the industry, is how are the big players positioning themselves.”

Nearby corn futures finished 13 cents higher Thursday, even though USDA’s corn numbers were considered bearish by most analysts.