ICE cotton futures rose on Monday, building off gains made due to physical buying and short-covering in the post-settlement period the prior session after a sharp move lower, with automatic buy-stops exaggerating the day's move higher. "There's just not a lot of willingness to be short," said Louis Rose, independent coffee trader and consultant at Risk Analytics in Memphis, Tennessee, noting that he was expecting upcoming US government reports to show strong export sales and a reduction in forecasts for acreage devoted to cotton.
Cotton contracts for December settled up 0.90 cent on Monday, a 1.4 percent gain, at 64.8 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 63.71 and 64.93 cents a pound. Total futures market volume fell by 728 lots to 19,878 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 66 contracts to 164,517 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of June 19 totalled 175,725 480-lb bales, down from 175,728 in the previous session.
The dollar index was up 0.23 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.5 percent. Speculators cut their net long position to 16,482 contracts, down from 21,883 in the latest week. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract rose to 50.644.