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Looks to me like the Chinese are making a big push in NG.
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=23736948
I'm only holding Strathmore but same story... Got a good deal going but all for nought ... was gonna sell earlier this week.. oh well..
Golds not my forte either..
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=23737218
U.S. ethanol profits improve as corn prices slump
Thu Jul 26, 2007 3:12PM EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUKN2643260320070726?rpc=44&sp=true
By Mark Weinraub
CHICAGO, July 26 (Reuters) - U.S. ethanol plants are recovering from a slump in profit margins following steady declines in corn prices the past month, but industry sources are expecting more volatility in the renewable fuels market.
"You have got more volatile markets which can lead to bigger swings in profit and loss," said Jason Sagebiel, a risk management consultant with commodity risk management and trading company FC Stone.
A U.S. Agriculture Department report issued in late June said that farmers planted the largest amount of corn acres since 1944 and spurred a sell-off in corn that has shaved about 9 percent off corn futures prices in the past month.
The sell-off led to a rebound in profit margins at ethanol plants, which had been struggling due to high input costs as corn prices hit 10-year highs in March.
"High corn prices have weighed on the ethanol sector for much of 2007, but we see the industry reaching an inflection point as profitability should be much improved in 2008 given our projections of reduced corn costs driving profit gains," Citigroup analyst David Driscoll said in a research note.
Ethanol production is supported by government subsidies of 51 cents per gallon but many producers' profits were threatened when corn prices were hovering around $4 per bushel earlier in the year.
"Seeing it run up as fast as it did ... has made our board of directors ... a lot more cautious," said Ryland Utlaut, president of ethanol producer Mid-Missouri Energy.
When corn prices were at their peak levels, many ethanol producers employed hedging strategies to protect them from further increases. Those strategies, while necessary to provide insurance in a volatile market, proved costly when prices fell throughout July and chilled some ethanol producers' enthusiasm.
"We cannot expect any kind of return like we had last year," Utlaut said.
Citigroup's Driscoll, who placed a "buy" rating on shares of alternative energy producers VeraSun Energy Corp. (VSE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Biofuel Energy Corp. (BIOF.O: Quote, Profile, Research) earlier in the week, said he expects corn prices to average around $2.75 per bushel in the long term.
Energy analysts have said that a 20 cent per bushel drop in corn prices adds about 5 cents per gallon to ethanol plant profit.
The run-up in corn prices earlier this year caused some ethanol producers to cut back on their investments in the industry.
Mid-Missouri Energy, a farmer-owned cooperative, tabled its discussions about doubling the size of its ethanol plant, Utlaut said. The company may still boost capacity in the future but there are no definite plans, he added.
But not all companies are backing away from investments.
VeraSun, the second-largest ethanol producer in the United States, said earlier this week it will pay $725 million to buy three ethanol plants from ASAlliances Biofuels LLC.
The deal, which will add 330 million gallons to VeraSun's annual ethanol production capacity, is expected to boost the company's earnings within the first year. (Additional reporting by Sam Nelson in Chicago)
You know red one hard thing to learn... which I'm just getting finally (thank God) is that when the market is turning it is quite OK to take profits when you are no longer at your highs... instead of waiting for it to get back there ... which may not (prolly not LOL) happen and you ride stuff all the way back down.. I know you posted that you were heavy on cash quite a while back... good move, especially on the nerves :O)
Yep I'm leaning towards upping the ante a bit more on ferts.. POT was mentioned a lot on BNN today.
Farmer tech... HEM.TO
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=21590824
I'm off worms :O)
I own SWP already though.. 11 was tempting. Sat on my hands though.. Was a little slow buying BQI @ 3.80 today.. didn't last long..
AG related idea for today.. This was mentioned on BNN today. HEM.TO GPS technology for farmers. http://www.hemispheregps.com/
Fund manager suggested 2.75 as a good entry.. just be;low resistance ??? prolly 2.85 is more likely...
Yes I agree... I took a small nibble but beyond that I'm just waiting...
looks like lots of folks looking to buy support on SWP.TO..
Well I have a big pop and fizzle in July... so the month over month change will be small from June.. I have cash now though... waiting...
so who is buying ?
OK who's
Naw just bemoaning that my entry could have been better... SWP was my ray of sunshine yesterday :O)
bought some SVU near the close today.. hope my timing is better than on HF ... gulp
looks like I bought the HF headfake :o(
Pinetree must have read your post and followed you in :O)
oh... that's not gonna hurt :O)
HF looks to be reversing ... Started buying some @ 13.61
Edit:
AFN.UN in the process of another leg up ? but I'm outta meaningful cash
Scary thing also is that Coxe has not really been on the Agri theme too long :O)
I tip my hat to you guys here and on the oilseeds / grains board .. best run I've had in quite some time... :o)
OT I hold GCR still. Maybe tomorrow I get to boost my profits in more than the ferts :O)
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=23709626
I'm still holding STM in the U's... but I keep hearing the haunting sound of Mike Reno crooning out When It's Over ..... :O)
I guessed that... but if you want to pull a bigger number out of thin air... that'll be fine too :O)
meet @ 7 ? That would be nice..
These things really do look strong... geesh.. Guess I'll buy more tomorrow.. the 'experts' say buy strength :o)
Anyone buy into Spur ? (SVU)
john, BLR.. think it should match ISX :O)
bought half my sale back a little higher ..
sold a few @ 2.20 ... maybe too soon... no pullback :O)
Unfortunately the trip ended up being too touristy as I had feared it might be as we were travelling with my parents and it was my dad's first trip to PRC. Didn't get to do any real 'off schedule' stuff. At any rate, anecdotally I'm disinclined to change my investment theme having seen what I have seen... I think I'm on the right track...
At least there was lots of water in the Yangtze for the cruise... which was great BTW. The single most transported object on the river that I saw was coal, by 1.6 country kilometers.
I'll have some pics and a summary soon of notes I took from observations and conversations..
LOL... 'salt mines' I meant work :O) I'll recap the China trip when I get back to TO.. Interesting talking to folks there... I need to crack those Mandarin books better.. but even my very rudimentary ability was a huge advantage. My son was thrilled to find a tv station from France in the hotel and happily watched Lucky Luke.. He's going to appreciate being multilingual earlier than my daughter did :O) They both got a lot more of the Chinese than I expected.. A peasant surprise..
B
Hi John,
In Burnaby as of yesterday. We are staying with one of my wife's cousins. Yes that ISX was very timely, as I made a bunch of buys before leaving (BLR also but less so)... should have bought more but I thought I might actually have overpaid for some of my ISX.. :O).. I see MGO has also come through nicely for my daughter, and even SWP is chugging along firmly... At any rate nice to come home to that... Early on in Beijing I was in the hotel business centre checking things out and my sister's boyfriend noted ISX was 9% off.. then waiting at the Yichan airport we checked again... it had closed at 1.65 :O) Ding ding hao !! (cool :0)
Off to do the tourist stuff now.. returning to Toronto and the salt mines Friday..
B
Greetings all from Shanghai... nice move in ISX :O)
Amazing place here... so much building and progress...
Kastel
Now I regret not dumping PBG profits from traders into more ISX and ALM IMMEDIATELY :O)
Got both :O) Will watch ISX now for pullback... but going to China soon...
Yeah looks like that order put in this AM for ISX @ .75 will not be hit today... :o)
yep
LOL... I enjoyed that... but then again I really do have Stompin' Tom CDs and I play them occasionally :O)
http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=23585703
As pork prices soar, Chinese put brakes on corn for ethanol.
With a famine less than 50 years in its past, China remains sensitive about using food for fuel.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
May 31, 2007 edition
Beijing
Ethanol production has put the Chinese government in an unpleasant bind, as fears rise that the environmentally friendly gasoline additive is also fueling politically dangerous increases in the price of food – particularly pork, a key staple.
With the ethanol industry gobbling up a growing share of China's corn harvest, authorities have stomped on the brakes to slow what one official report calls "blind" investment in distilleries.
"China cannot sacrifice food security for energy: that seems to be the majority view in the government now," says Zhang Zhongjun, deputy head of the Beijing bureau of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao offered the latest sign of government concern when he made a highly publicized visit last weekend to a piggery and a meat market in Xi'an, about 750 miles southwest of Beijing. The price of pork has gone up by 29 percent over the past year and the price of live pigs by 71 percent, according to the Agriculture Ministry.
In a country where people eat more pork than anywhere else in the world except Germany, that jump in the price of a staple has dominated recent headlines and sparked grumbling.
"The government is going all out to ensure the supply of pork and keep it affordable," Mr. Wen reassured a supermarket crowd, according to the Xinhua state news agency.
"The Chinese government is very sensitive to this," says Hu Xingdou, a political analyst at the Beijing Institute of Technology. "They are afraid that rising prices will affect social stability. They have not forgotten that inflation was an important reason for people to get involved in the events of 1989," when students led massive protests in Tiananmen Square.
Industry analysts blame the price rises partly on a shortage of pigs in the wake of outbreaks of "blue-ear disease" around China.
Though the authorities have publicly admitted to only 300 deaths, they have privately reported 100,000 mortalities to international agencies, and even that figure is not credible, say experts.
"Several million pigs may have died, we just don't know," says one international expert familiar with the situation. Chinese farmers raised 465 million pigs last year.
At the root of the problem, though, say agriculture analysts, is the rising cost of pig feed, which is comprised mostly of corn. Despite a bumper crop last year, corn prices have risen by nearly 30 percent over the past nine months on the Dalian Commodities Exchange.
That, says Luo Yunbo, head of the food-science department at China Agriculture University, is because "corn is being sought for industrial purposes, such as ethanol, not just agricultural use."
Pushback on ethanol
Ethanol has been trumpeted as the alternative fuel of the future, offering cleaner energy and new opportunities for farmers in developing countries.
China's current Five Year Plan sets the goal of using biofuels for 15 per-cent of the country's transport needs by 2020; already gas stations in a number of provinces mix 10 percent ethanol into the gasoline they sell.
But critics around the world have recently begun to question the unconsidered effects of large-scale ethanol production, such as increasing competition for human or animal food supplies. And in China, where an estimated 30 million people died in a famine less than 50 years ago, many have reservations about using food for fuel.
As ethanol factories large and small have sprung up in China's corn producing regions in recent years, they have begun to compete with animal-feed manufacturers for raw materials.
The industrial use of corn nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005, to 23 million tons, according to a study released last December by the National Development and Reform Committee, China's chief economic planning agency. That represented 16.5 percent of the corn harvest in 2005.
The result, said the report, is a shortage of corn. "Corn supplies to the processing industry compete with supply for [animal] feed, which impacts the development of stock-breeding."
The proportion of China's corn crop used for nonfood purposes is dwarfed by the 30 percent of American corn that goes into ethanol, and Chinese ethanol production – estimated at 3.7 million tons by the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center in 2005 – was a quarter of US levels.
But "China is different," argues the FAO's Mr. Zhang. "America and Brazil have huge land areas and plenty of water," he points out. "China has shortages of water and arable land, and it is a deficit country," importing more grain than it exports.
Debate in China picking up speed
In the ongoing debate among Chinese leaders and scholars about the value of ethanol and biofuels, "more and more people think that China's potential is not so big, that China cannot use food for fuel because food security is more important than energy and because food is politically very important," Zhang says.
Such arguments convinced the government to slap new controls on the corn-processing industry late last December, suspending all investment projects still in the pipeline and insisting that all future ethanol projects should apply for approval from state planning agencies.
The continuing rise in corn prices since the beginning of this year suggests that the central government is having its usual difficulty in controlling developments in China's provinces. But the crisis has not deterred the authorities from pursuing other ethanol distilling projects and biofuel experiments.
A state-owned grain and oils conglomerate will launch a pilot project later this year to process cassava – a starchy tuber that is not considered a food in China – into ethanol. Plans are also under way to plant tens of thousands of acres of jatropha – also inedible and grown in wastelands – by the end of the decade.
One principle must rule the development of China's alternative fuel industry, the National Development and Reform Committee insists: "a guarantee that foodgrains are not the main source" of its raw materials.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0531/p01s04-wosc.html
that's OK I'm just accumulating a few here and there like KEX yesterday :O).. again cheaper a bit today.. but closed OK and GCR too :O)
Sold a few more RPT today ... just some of my junior golds sucking wind...
Added some MGO yesterday.. cheaper today.
just added a few ISX..
zzzzzzzzzzzz
Shucks I only have that in my wife's account... which I didn't check yet ... thanks... now I feel better :O)
Besides.. if Coxe is right I SB fine with my allocations..
ooooo nice pop... and a some volume too..