"Thank you for your valuable service. I would appreciate your views on timing of new long positions in Corn and Oats - these appear short term overextended but as per your comments on base building, look like they have further to go. Also would you see other grains offering a more favourable alternative in your assessment? I realise this is the difficult one to call but would value your thoughts and approach to assessing this."

David Fuller's view Thanks for your comments and question which is sure to be of interest to some other subscribers.

The first point I would make is that while fundamentals are driving this move, you will probably find chart reading skills more helpful for timing and tactics, not least in terms of money control disciplines.

Wheat (weekly & daily) is probably a useful template for grains and beans in this cycle, having led on the upside and also in terms of a significant, post-breakout from base correction and consolidation. Therefore if wheat were to resume its uptrend, this would almost certainly be quite bullish for the sector.

Corn (weekly & daily) and oats (weekly & daily) do indeed appear somewhat overextended in the short term, but probably not in proportion to the large underlying base formations. As I hold corn, I had to decide whether to keep a trailing in-the-money stop tight or loose. I opted for the former as corn moved sharply higher. I doubt that it will fulfil its potential in a straight line, so my intention was to take profits quickly as a reaction commenced, and then repurchase somewhat lower if possible. Oats lend themselves to similar tactics.

Inevitably, this requires some luck as close stops are much more likely to be triggered by fractionally larger reactions which are soon reversed. This happened to me with half of my rough rice (weekly & daily) position last week.

In fact, having raised my corn stop this morning, on seeing additional strength in Asian trading, I was stopped out at $5.12 this afternoon, shortly after writing the comments above.

In a strong and fundamentally driven ongoing move, I think the entire grain and bean complex would participate. For this reason I bought soybeans (weekly & daily) last week as they appeared likely to break up out of their base formation. I had also purchased wheat a little earlier as it had steadied following a correction.

Subscribers trading these markets are probably as good at determining tactics as anyone. The key point, I believe, is to not leverage up without sound money control tactics. Without these any trader will burn for the faith at some point.