Cotton drifts lower as weary speculators hold off on buying

ICE cotton futures inched lower on Friday after correcting upward in the prior session from a two-week low, as speculators refrained from buying after suffering heavy losses during the sharp move lower earlier in the week. "The mills don't want to pay up and the growers don't want to let it go so cheap," said Peter Egli, describing the physical stand-off that allowed the market to be dominated by speculative dealings.
December cotton on ICE Futures US settled down 0.35 cent on Friday, a 0.6 percent loss, at 63.00 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 62.76 and 63.62 cents a pound. Total futures market volume fell by 2,619 to 15,534 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 109 to 181,015 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of August 27 totalled 73,638 480-lb bales, down from 76,487 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.54 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 2.32 percent. Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 41.566.