Good morning and welcome to Markets Desk, your Friday market roundup.
Wheat is leading the grain complex lower this morning, with Chicago soft red winter contracts posting double-digit losses after the complex had rallied to fresh multi-year highs overnight. The pullback looks like a classic case of profit-taking ahead of the weekend, with open interest having climbed more than eight thousand contracts.
Corn and cotton are following suit, with corn off four to five cents in early trade, reversing the modest two to three cent gains it held through Thursday's close. Cotton is down as much as one hundred forty-one points on some contracts, giving back Thursday's strength despite crude oil lending some support and a firmer dollar adding complexity to the export picture.
Turning to tech, a coalition of twenty-five companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Mistral has released an open letter to Washington pushing back against what they're calling premature restrictions on open-weight artificial intelligence models. Notably absent from the signatories are OpenAI and Anthropic. The letter lands as Chinese open-weight models continue gaining ground against American offerings, making this as much a competitiveness argument as a policy one.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
