Corn, soybeans, and two wheat contracts — the deepest, most fought-over complex in agricultural futures. Every summer the US growing season re-prices the global balance sheet acre by acre, and every Friday the COT report shows who believed the weather. We track both sides of that argument.
Explore the Demo → Current corn signal →The grain complex is where agricultural futures started, and it is still where the most information collides: weekly government condition ratings, monthly world balance sheets, satellite-era drought maps, export inspections, and one of the deepest speculative books in any commodity. The US crop is measured in public, in near real time — the market's job is deciding how much of each measurement to believe.
That makes grains unusually rich in checkable questions. When Good-to-Excellent ratings slip three points in July, is that within the normal week-to-week churn, or the start of a condition slide that historically costs bushels of yield? When the Drought Monitor paints the HRW belt red in April, does it matter more or less than the same map in October? The data to answer those questions exists — it is just scattered across half a dozen agencies that publish on different days in different formats.
And the Northern Hemisphere is only half the year. Brazil's safrinha corn and Argentina's soy harvest re-run the entire drama every Southern summer, with CONAB and the USDA frequently telling different stories about the same fields. The gap between those two estimates has a habit of closing violently. Which one do you trade?
Every SoftSignal market is covered the same way: who holds the positions, what the balance sheet says, what conditions on the ground are doing, and what the climate background implies. For grains, each layer looks like this.
Grain risk moves with the crop calendar. July weather is corn weather; August belongs to soybeans; wheat runs on a different clock entirely — and South America re-opens the whole question in December.
Approximate national windows; state-level progress differs and is exactly what USDA crop progress tracks week by week. The Grain Outlook runs full-season April through November, with positioning and drought coverage continuing through winter.
On the monthly clock: WASDE lands around the 10th–12th and gets a same-day visual supplement. Twice a year — March Prospective Plantings, June Acreage — the acreage supplement re-baselines the whole complex. CONAB's Brazil surveys arrive on their own monthly cycle.
The core read, three times a week: COT percentiles for all four contracts, condition ratings with seasonal overlays, drought-belt coverage, and release-day context at WASDE and acreage reports.
See it in the demo →A clean visual read of every monthly WASDE — ending stocks, stocks-to-use back to 2007, and month-over-month revisions for corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton.
See it in the demo →Brazil's official estimates tracked against WASDE — plus current-conditions monitoring for the Argentine Pampas, MATOPIBA, and Black Sea wheat.
See it in the demo →Public one-page reads for each contract — managed-money regime, week-over-week change, and condition stress — updated after every CFTC release.
Corn → Soybeans → HRW → SRW →The full Grain Outlook — positioning percentiles, condition overlays, drought maps, and the WASDE supplement — is in the open demo. No email, no card.