Commodities: Wheat jumps on calls for smaller Russian harvest, WTI up despite DoE data

Agricultural commodities were sporting the biggest gains on Wednesday evening, paced by gains in wheat amid talk of a bad start to Russia's spring harvest.

According to Bloomberg, the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies pared its estimate for Russia's wheat harvest by 9% from 2017's record level, to between 72m and 78m bushels, as residual snow and a cold winter shortened and delayed the planting period for the Spring crop.

On the back of the news, July 2018 wheat on the Chicago Board of Trade was again jumping higher, advancing 3.05% to change hands at $4.99 a bushel.

In parallel, July 2018 cotton #2 was up by 2.98% at $0.8394 a pound on the ICE.

Cocoa was continuing to push ahead meanwhile, rising 0.75% to $2,836 per metric tonne on ICE.

Futures in the energy patch were also mostly on the up, despite the Department of Energy reporting a surprise 2.2m barrel build in the nation's commercial crude oil stockpiles for the week ending on 20 April.

Analysts had incorrectly anticipated a draw of 2.0m barrels.

Despite that, WTI futures for prompt month delivery were edging higher by 0.28% to $67.89 a barrel on NYMEX, against a backdrop of headlines regarding a combined US and French push to revamp the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran ahead of a key 12 May deadline set by Washington.

Against that backdrop, as of 2002 BST the Bloomberg commodity index was edging higher by 0.19% to 89.25, alongside a rise of 0.44% in the US dollar spot index to 91.1640.

Both base and precious metals on the other hand were lower, weighed down by both the stronger US dollar and, according to some analysts, perceptions of now lower geopolitical risks.

"Gold prices continued to head south, to 1318 lows at time of writing, driven by a combination of a stronger dollar and perceptions of reduced short term geopolitical risk," said traders at Sucden Financial shortly after the end of trading on London markets.

June futures for the 'yellow metal' were thus to be seen down by 0.73% at $1,323/oz. on COMEX, alongside a fall of 1.02% to $16.61/oz. for July silver.

Three-month LME copper futures on the other hand clawed back some ground, finishing at $7,008 per metric tonne versus a Tuesday close of $6,986 per tonne, although the appreciation in the greenback was also cited as a headwind in this case.