Malaysian palm oil futures fell for a second consecutive session on Thursday, hit by weaker US soyaoil and a failure to break the previous session's intraday high, dealers said, forecasting further range-bound trading, pending new leads.
Benchmark palm oil futures for April delivery on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Exchange were down 0.6 percent at 3,131 ringgit ($704) a tonne at the end of the trading day.
Traded volumes stood at 41,828 lots of 25 tonnes each on Thursday evening.
"The market's technicals are not good, it couldn't break yesterday's high of 3,175 ringgit," said a trader from Kuala Lumpur.
"People could also be wanting to liquidate their position because of Trump," he said, referring to the US President-elect's inauguration on Friday and concerns about his policies.
Palm was down earlier in the day on the back of weaker US soya. Palm prices often track the movements of related edible oils as they compete for a share in the global vegetable oils market. The March soyabean oil contract on the CBOT is down by 0.2 percent.
Despite the decline, palm is still near a more-than-four-year high on tight market supplies, as production levels are still reeling from the effects of the crop-damaging El Nino.
Traders and analysts expect output to remain slow until the second or even third quarter of the year.
Malaysian output for the year, however, is seen rising 12 percent to 19.4 million tonnes from 2016, as the trees recover from dry weather, according to the Malaysian Palm Oil Board.
In other related edible oils, the May soyabean oil contract on the Dalian Commodity Exchange climbed 0.1 percent, while the May contract for Dalian palm olein declined 0.2 percent.
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