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January 11th, 2017
Cocoa looks the best bet among soft commodities for price rises, veteran analyst Judith Ganes Chase said, warning of “somewhat bearish” dynamics in coffee, and cotton prices that are already “too attractive” for growers.
Ms Ganes Chase named cocoa futures – which touched $2,121 a tonne in New York in late December, the lowest for a spot contract since March 2013 – as her “favoured pick” among soft commodities “as a market that has room to climb”.
“The cocoa market remains at low levels relative to the rest of the softs complex and would seem to have fundamentals that are not quite as bearish as market action suggested,” she said.
While acknowledging firm expectations for cocoa output in Ivory Coast, the top producer, saying that “there is no anecdotal evidence to believe the crop will miss production targets”, Ms Ganes Chase flagged potential support to prices from demand.
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January 6th, 2017
Cocoa futures prices rose on Friday as disgruntled soldiers seized control of the second largest city in the world’s top grower Ivory Coast, prompting a wave of short covering, though the New York market turned lower along with the weak British pound.
Sugar and coffee futures eased.
March London cocoa settled up 12 pounds, or 0.7 percent, at 1,821 pounds per tonne, after surging 2.2 percent to a two-week high at 1,848 pounds following the reports from Ivory Coast.
Unrest in Ivory Coast appeared to be spreading with reports that gunfire had erupted in the western cocoa growing region of Daloa, hours after soldiers demanding salary increases seized the second largest city, Bouake.
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January 3rd, 2017
Hedge funds approached the end of 2016 on a bearish note in agricultural commodities, cutting bets on price rises for a fourth successive week, as they stretched to a record a selling spree in softs such as cocoa and coffee.
Managed money, a proxy for speculators, cut its net long position in futures and options in the top 13 US-traded agricultural commodities, from corn to sugar, by 37,457 contracts in the week to last Tuesday, analysis of data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulator shows.
The selldown reduced the net long – the extent to which long bets, which profit when values rise, exceed short holdings, which benefit when prices fall – to the lowest in two months.
And it included bearish positioning in both grains, in which hedge funds returned to a net short position, as well as in New York-traded soft commodities, which also include cotton and sugar.
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