ICE cotton futures fell on Monday, continuing last week's move downward as concerns about weather in top growing region Texas dissipated as forecasts showed dry weather in the week ahead, which traders said should allow harvesting to resume. This outweighed expectations for potentially harvest-disrupting rains elsewhere in the US cotton belt, where the harvest is further along, mitigating concerns, said Sterling Terrell, a commodity trading adviser in Lubbock, Texas.
The forecast comes as US export sales have remained weak in recent weeks, highlighting the lack of demand that has weighed on prices. "Demand has been mediocre at best for weeks," said Rogers Varner, president of Varner Brokerage in Cleveland, Mississippi. December cotton on ICE Futures US settled down by 0.63 cent on Monday, a 1 percent loss, to 62.13 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 61.91 and 62.75 cents a pound.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of October 23 totalled 44,141 480-lb bales, up from 43,749 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.29 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.74 percent. Speculators raised their net long position in cotton to 38,808 from 29,726 in the latest week. Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 46.171.