The December live cattle contract traded slightly lower today after the Cattle on Feed numbers came out after the close on Friday. The market reacted to those numbers in a relatively correlated action with the CoF numbers coming in slightly bearish overall. The Dec contract settled at 150.525 today on higher volume than Friday. The trend was broken with today’s low being put in but closing well off the lows and not trading below the 150 level leads me to believe that the market is still bullish overall.
I believe futures traders will soon turn attention to this week’s cash market, which is coming off two consecutive weeks of firm gains. Live steers averaged $146.76 last week through Friday morning, up $2.37 from the previous week’s average. Cattle of Feed numbers may prompt packers to be less aggressive this week.
Slaughter numbers continue to be strong with 122,000 head slaughtered on Friday and 40,000 on Saturday. This brings the total from last week up to 661,000 head which was higher than last weeks number of 647,000 but just lower than last year’s number of 666,000.