ICE cotton futures gained 1 percent on Friday to recover partially from
the previous session''s decline, on speculative buying and short-covering, but
they were down for the week. The July cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S. settled
up 1.17 percent at 78.87 cents per lb, after falling nearly 2 percent in the
previous session. The contract was down about 0.6 percent for the week after
two consecutive weekly gains. "Today is the end of the month so you''re
seeing some short- covering and I think people are still buying it for the
trend," said Keith Brown, principal at cotton broker Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia. "We had a very sloppy export number
yesterday which broke the market but the trend of the market is still up and so
I think the speculators still continue to buy the breaks.
Weekly export sales data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on
Thursday showed sales totaled 115,500 running bales for the previous week, the
lowest since late September. "We''ve seen open interest increase which
means there has been additional speculative money coming into the market,"
said Jim
Lambert,
director of sales at FCStone Merchant Services. Speculators raised their net
long position in cotton for the second straight week in the week to April 25,
by 10,429 contracts to 95,359, U.S. Commodity
Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday. * The
July cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S. settled up 0.91 cent, or 1.17 percent,
at 78.87 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 77.65 and 78.97 cents a lb.
* Total futures market volume rose by 2,877 to 24,094 lots. Data showed total
open interest gained 440 to 253,351 contracts in the previous session.
Source: DNA India, India Saturday, 29 April 2017