Butter down, Protein Up, Cheese Stable?

The market showed itself from its most surprising side again. Sometimes we have to double checks our bids and offers twice as prices change up and down quicker than we can type.  After trading higher in the last few days, the butter market suddenly decided to trade down (significantly), without any clear signals from the market to go on. Meanwhile, the market for SMP seems to firm up more and more, while it remains impossible to get (market-level) offers for cheese. What is driving these trades? We just don't know. 

Where in the last weeks we didn't see any fundamental change, but we did see prices move upwards we were a bit puzzled by the continued increasing markets. But now the fundamentals of the market continue to point to higher prices (less milk, higher cream prices, higher smc prices and higher prices on futures) the market for fat traded almost € 150,- lower compared to the previous days.

Looking at the market for liquids we see that cream prices are topping off a bit, and we hear slightly lower trades again. But looking at the SMC market, we see a continuing trend with prices up to € 2250 DAP customers.

Market sentiment remains a very powerful influence, especially on the butter market. Even though we see a lower trend we aren't quite convinced we see (again) a reversal of the fat markets. With cheese giving a much better valorization than butter, we were expecting a slowdown in cheese prices, but an increase in butter prices.

Maybe the roundtables, the drinks and the meetings at the Eucolait will shine a new light on the market, and maybe they will boost the current market trends a bit more. Anyways, there are exciting times ahead of us.