Cotton futures fall to tree-week low as dollar rallies

Benchmark cotton futures on ICE dropped to a three-week low on Wednesday in a broad-based commodities sell-off, weighed by a stronger US dollar. "We came out of the box today with the dollar firming up, grains and crude (oil) under pressure," said Jobe Moss, a broker with MCM Inc in Lubbock, Texas. The climbing greenback makes dollar-traded commodities more expensive to holders of other currencies. The second-month contract saw its biggest one-day rout in two weeks.
The December cotton contracts on ICE Futures US settled down by 1.26 cent, down 1.9 percent, to 64.87 cents per pound after dropping as low as 64.60 cents. The cash to second-month spread fell 0.13 cent to 0.32 cents per pound. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of July 14 totalled 142,630 480-lb bales, down from 144,121 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.53 percent. The Thomson Reuters Core Commodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 1.26 percent.