ICE cotton fell on Tuesday, as investors booked profits after prices surged to a near four-year high in the previous session. The most active ICE cotton contract for March expiry settled down 0.25 cent, or 0.31 percent, at 81.43 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 80.62 and 82.05 cents a lb.
"It's a really thin market (compared with Friday) and when you get at this kind of altitude, you can have a setback at anytime and I think that's what's happening. It just ran up a little too far too fast," said Sid Love, commodity trading advisor at Kansas-based Sid Love Consulting. Cotton futures hit their highest point since March 2014 at 84.65 cents on Friday before settling lower on profit-taking and amid a slightly bearish supply-demand report from the US government.
Total futures market volume fell by 39,577 to 33,486 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 45 to 299,580 contracts in the previous session. Speculators raised their bullish bet on cotton for an eighth straight week in the week to January 9, adding 1,814 contracts to 101,350 contracts, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday. China's 2017 cotton imports increased 27 percent year on year to 1.16 million tonnes, a government-backed trade website said on Tuesday.