ICE cotton futures rose on Friday, helping the fiber close out its biggest weekly gain in two months, as producers and merchants hesitated to make forward sales of high-grade cotton as uncertainty lingered about crop quality. Demand for high-grade cotton remains high, but questions over the timing of the El Nino phenomenon left open the possibility that rains could harm crop quality, as the bulk of the crop is not yet harvested, said Ron Lawson, a partner at commodity investment firm Logic Advisors in Sonoma, California.
"You can't sell what you can't see," Lawson said. Cotton contracts for December settled up by 0.41 cent on Friday, a 0.6 percent gain, to 63.85 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 62.87 and 63.95 cents a pound. It ended the week up 3.6 percent, its biggest weekly gain since the week ended August 14. US export sales for the prior week totalled 67,300 bales, down 68 percent from the prior week and 47 percent from the prior 4-week average, according to US government data released Friday morning.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of October 15 totalled 42,922 480-lb bales, unchanged from 42,922 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.36 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.23 percent. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract rose to 62.588.
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