Trading volatility to stay

VOLATILITY is here and it was going to continue, said Jon Duffy of Frontier Agriculture.

Traders were now regularly seeing an £8 to £9 per tonne swing in grain prices over the course of a day, he told the Norfolk Farming Conference. “The cost of getting things right or wrong can have dramatic difference to your farming bottom line.”

When the 'massive movements' in input costs, as well as currency movements, were also considered, marketing decisions had never been more important.

Ways of managing volatility included knowing your costs. “You cannot make decisions if you don't know your costs,” he warned. Farmers should try to turn off emotion when making marketing decisions, which was difficult to do, but they must make decisions. “There is no point sitting there doing nothing.”