The Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services reports the typical spring rally in live hog prices has been slow to happen this year.
North American live hog prices have remained fairly steady over the past couple of months, increasing only slightly.
Tyler Fulton, the Director of Risk Management with h@ms Marketing Services, reports the normal seasonal spring rally has failed to materialize this year.
We typically start to see some support in cash hog prices over the latter part of March and in through the month of April but that really failed to transpire except for really just the last week or so. The last week of April has seen some support which it needed to because a lot of market participants were starting get a little concerned that we weren’t seeing the spring support that we typically do at this time of year.
The fundamentals behind it are generally fairly steady hog numbers with last year with the exception of last week that showed roughly a four percent increase in the number of hogs. The U.S. slaughter has been on pace with last year’s numbers.
There was an expectation that, over the months of April and May, that they could run as much as two to even three percent lower. The latest USDA report suggested that they were going to be pretty steady.
There was a group that thought we could be looking at some tightness which would support prices but it didn’t really materialize and so we’ve been running pretty similar to with what USDA estimates were and also what year ago levels were. ~ Tyler Fulton – h@ms Marketing Services
Fulton says the expectation is that we’re going to be running into some tighter supplies into the summer time frame and that should encourage some price support.
