Pay attn to this. I've hand charted commercial net position in C/B for a few years now...it's been quite foretelling of OVERALL underlying strength or weakness. I've overlayed this comm net pos RELATIVE chart in blue on the Corn continuation chart. Y-axis represents their net LENGTH. As you'll see, they are MOST short @ highs...long @ lows. Chart is current & goes back to Oct. 2011.
The only recent time period they were more long than current and last June ---was Oct 2008 - Jun 2010 when prices were in 300's.... What I also believe to be noteworthy is they were as short as -700k contracts before top in 2011. They only got about minus 550k LAST summer.
For further numerical reference, June 2012 comm net about - 268k---last 3 weeks between -294k and -310k. Feb-Apr 2010 about -225k, again when Corn prices were between 350-375
