NEW YORK: US orange juice futures set a 2-1/2-year low for the second straight day on Wednesday as large supplies and soft retail demand put more pressure on a market that is already down by half from record highs early this year.
"You hit some stops and got below key support levels, and then cascaded down to the next support levels," said Kevin Sharpe, a juice broker at Florida's Basic Commodities, describing the day's action on ICE Futures US
"There's really no one interested in buying", considering the build-up in warehouse supplies of FCOJ, he added.
Juice futures are down 50 percent since racing to all-time highs of nearly $2.27 a lb in January. That high was set amid fears of a supply crunch after the discovery of the use of prohibited fungicide in citrus exports from top producer/exporter Brazil.
The supply fears have all but receded in recent months, with a bountiful harvest adding to warehoused inventories of FCOJ while retail demand continues to sag.
In Wednesday's session on ICE Futures US, the key July FCOJ contract, settled down 1.05 percent, or 1.2 cents, at $1.1280 per lb.
The session low was $1.1035 -- which marked a trough dating back to November 2009 for the front-month contract.
Despite the price tumble, traders and analysts have said for weeks now that FCOJ was likely to see some support ahead of the annual US hurricane season between June 1 and Nov 30. In past years, hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea have battered Florida's citrus groves.
Even if there was no immediate impact from the hurricane factor, traders expect commercial buying to emerge once prices near the $1 per lb level.
Trading volumes in FCOJ on Wednesday stood at 945 lots, down 60 percent from the 30-day norm, preliminary Thomson Reuters data showed.
Open interest, an indicator of investor exposure, grew to 22,479 lots as of May 14, from the prior day's count of 22,342 lots, ICE Futures US data showed.
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