Soybeans: Firm sales in Argentina and bullish signals from Chicago
Soybeans continue to lead producers' sales rankings, being their preferred product when it comes to restoring liquidity, whether to cover commitments, exchange plans, or to face the costs of planting summer crops. In the first week of October, producers sold a total of 2.118 billion tons of available soybeans from the current 2024-25 harvest to exporters and the oil industry. During the same period, producers sold a total of 675,000 tons of soybeans from the upcoming 2025-26 harvest.
Export purchases, both of old-crop and new-crop soybeans, were mostly priced . This pattern of priced purchases by exporters is due to the strategy of not holding open purchase positions without a fixed price and securing the business margin, minimizing the risk of price fluctuations. Furthermore, soybean exports always have a more limited timeframe in which to compete with soybean supplies from other countries such as Brazil and the United States, while the oil industry needs to process soybeans year-round and, therefore, diversifies its purchasing methods.
For this reason, oil mill purchases for new 2025/26 soybeans are more balanced between price and fixed prices . The total volume of new soybeans purchased by the industry reaches 2.36 million tons, of which 1.25 million tons, or 53%, are purchases at price, and 1.1 million tons, or 47%, are purchases to be fixed. For the 2024/25 harvest, oil mills have accumulated purchases of 26.9 million tons, of which 16.3 million tons were purchased at price, or 60%, and 10.5 million tons were purchased to be fixed, equivalent to 40% of the total purchased.
Regarding the industry's net position , it shows a positive result of 2.5 million tons, enough for less than a month of crushing. Meanwhile, the A3 market shows a downward trend from now until the arrival of soybeans from the new harvest. With an available soybean price of US$342/t, October at US$334/t, November to January at US$332/t, and then entering a sharp decline in March to US$316/t, finally reaching a price of US$309/t for soybeans future position April 2026.
The logic of a bear market is developing between the prices of old, available soybeans and new soybeans, known as an "inverse" market. On the international market, the FOB price for Argentine ports is trading at US$400/t, while the FOB price for American soybeans on the Gulf is trading at US$398/t. As we can see, this is a very tight market between the two exporting countries.
Analyzing the future, we see that, against a bearish scenario for soybeans in Argentina, an upward trend is consolidating in the Chicago market since the end of the US soybean harvest . The Chicago market shows an increase of US$18/t between the November 2025 position and May 2026, with an upward staircase: November at US$372/t, January at US$378/t, March at US$384/t, and May at US$389.5/t. The key issue is being able to predict how much of this increase in the price of Chicago soybeans can be transferred to the improvement in the price of soybeans in Argentina.
The author is president of Pablo Adreani and Assoc.
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