Wheat Crops
Wheat dropped, eliminating a monthly gain, after Russia, once the second-biggest exporter, said it will allow grain shipments to resume and as rains may alleviate drought in French growing areas.
"A slight improvement in crop weather and the imminent removal" of the Russian ban pushed prices lower, said Luke Mathews, a commodity strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.
The benchmark contract for July-delivery dropped as much as 4.4 percent to $7.84 a bushel in Chicago before trading at $8.005 a bushel. Before today, futures jumped 79 percent in 12 months as floods damaged crops in Canada and Australia and dryness threatened output in the U.S. and Europe.
The net-long position of funds across 18 U.S. commodity futures and options jumped 7.6 percent to 1.17 million contracts in the week ended May 24, after holdings plunged 27 percent in previous three weeks, data compiled by Bloomberg from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission show.
Investors poured $702.8 million into commodity funds in the week ended May 25, the first increase in three weeks, according to EPFR Global, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based researcher. The previous three weeks had outflows totaling $5.5 billion.