ICE cotton futures rose to their highest in nearly a week on Thursday after a strong US government export sales report, before falling back to end the session negative ahead of the heart of the index fund roll period. "There's not much time to start building a significant long here," said Louis Rose, independent cotton trader and analyst with Risk Analytics in Memphis, Tennessee, noting that the largest index funds were expected to begin rolling positions from the July contract to the December contract on Friday.
July cotton on ICE Futures US settled down 0.12 cent on Thursday, a 0.2 percent drop, at 65.12 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 64.94 and 65.95 cents a pound. US net export sales for the current crop reached 106,600 bales of cotton last week, up 74 percent from the prior four-week average, according to US Department of Agriculture data released on Thursday. This raised expectations that the USDA would boost its estimate for total US exports in the 2014/15 crop year from 10.7 million bales.
Total futures market volume fell by 3,780 to 30,511 lots. Total open interest fell 1,615 to 186,060 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of June 3 totalled 140,119 480-lb bales, up from 139,272 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.06 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.83 percent. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 53.612.