The commodities market is a close-knit one, with the price hike in one commodity often affecting another. Such correlation is evident in agricultural products such as soybean meals, corn, and lean hogs.
Lean hog prices are highly correlated with Soybean Meal and Corn as young feeder pigs are fed a diet of roughly 70% corn and 30% soybean meal. As such when corn and soybean prices rise, lean hog prices often follow suit.
As spelt out in some of our previous ideas, we think agricultural commodities are due for a rally amid the backdrop of supply chain constraints arising from the Russian-Ukraine crisis, and high fertilizer costs (due to surging natural gas prices) which in turn feed into crop planting cost. Over the past 3 weeks, most agricultural products staged a rebound with Soybean Meal and Corn getting in on the action as well.
The rally resulted in Corn prices up 15% and Soybean Meal prices up 10% from 3 weeks ago while lean hog prices lagged, moving only 4.4%. Thus, we think that lean hog prices have room for more upside.
Looking at the chart of HEZ2022, we see the lean hog December 2022 futures breaking out of the range established from the start of the year and coming back to retest the range-high. We see this as support for lean hog prices to break up.
Should agricultural commodities continue their rally, higher feed cost would be translated into high lean hog prices.
Spread Entry at 90.250, stops at 87.850. Targets at 95.
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