CME cattle futures tick down on weak equity markets
By Heather Schlitz
CHICAGO, Dec 19 (Reuters) -Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) live and feeder cattle contracts slid on Thursday as weakness in equities, a strong dollar and technical trading pressured futures, analysts said.
Lean hog futures ticked down slightly as market players came to view hogs as overbought.
CME January feeder cattle FCF25 settled down 2.525 cents to 254.475 cents per pound. February live cattle LCG25 ended down 1.775 cents to 186.550 cents per pound. February lean hog futures LHG25 settled down 0.075 cents to 83.625 cents per pound.
The cautious note struck by the Federal Reserve's economic projections and the expected slowdown of rate cuts prompted the steepest U.S. stock selloff in months on Wednesday, though the market recovered slightly on Thursday.
"The cattle market looks at equities as a proxy for demand, and we saw the big shakeout in equities yesterday and that has certainly weighed on prices," Altin Kalo, economist at Steiner Group, said.
The U.S. dollar index .DXY is also hovering near a two-year peak, which makes U.S. exports less competitive.
Relatively weak export sales of beef have also weighed on cattle futures. EXP/BEEF
The U.S.-Mexico border remains closed to cattle imports after the discovery of New World screwworm in southern Mexico, further restricting U.S. cattle supply and adding underlying support to futures, traders said.
A Reuters poll released ahead of the USDA's monthly Cattle on Feed report showed analysts expect U.S. November cattle placements to be 5.1% lower than last year.
The USDA's report will be released on Friday at 2000 GMT (2 p.m. CST).
The size of the U.S. hog herd was about the same on Dec. 1 as a year earlier, a Reuters survey of analysts showed on Thursday, ahead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's quarterly Hogs and Pigs report that will be released on Monday.
Reporting by Heather Schlitz; Editing by Shreya Biswas
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