ICE cotton futures fell in light volume on Wednesday, hitting three-week lows a day ahead of a weekly US government export sales report amid concerns about demand for US cotton in key consuming markets due to dollar strength. "We're going to wait until the morning to see what the export report says," Louis Rose, an independent cotton trader and consultant at Risk Analytics in Memphis, Tennessee, said of the day's light trade.
December cotton on ICE Futures US settled down by 0.21 cent on Wednesday, a 0.3 percent loss, to 62.49 cents per pound, after falling as low as 62.11 cents a lb, its lowest level since Aug. 12. Total futures market volume fell by 892 to 16,475 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 1,379 to 178,810 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Sept. 1 totalled 65,881 480-lb bales, down from 67,197 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.37 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.40 percent. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 39.073.