US cotton futures settled lower for a second day in a row on Wednesday as funds and merchants sold amid weaker textile demand and price pressure from new-crop sales in the Southern Hemisphere, analysts said. The key May cotton contract on ICE Futures US shed 2.38 cents to settle at $1.9735 per lb, trading from $1.967 to $2.0673.
Second-position July sustained the biggest losses on the board by dropping 4.93 cents to close at $1.8064 per lb. The new-crop December cotton contract declined 0.86 cent to finish at $1.347.
-- Merchant, fund sales depress cotton market Total trading volume was around 42,200 lots, almost two-thirds above the 30-day norm, Thomson Reuters preliminary data showed. "That's what July is reflecting, the softening of demand (in the market)," said Mike Stevens, an independent cotton analyst in Louisiana who added that high cotton prices are forcing a "rationing" of demand from fibre consumers.
Traders said the second-position July cotton contract has come under pressure as producers in major Southern Hemisphere growers Australia, Brazil and Argentina market their cotton. The new-crop December cotton contract, on the other hand, stumbled on expectations that US 2011 cotton plantings will likely exceed the government estimate of 12.566 million acres.
Monsanto's director of marketing for agriculture in the southern United States, David Rhylander, predicted that the US Agriculture Department survey of US cotton sowings should increase given high cotton prices. Monsanto is one of the biggest sellers of cotton seed in the world.
Open interest in the cotton market stood at 198,223 lots as of April 12, just shy of the two-month peak at 200,051 lots hit last week, data from ICE Futures US showed. Traders said the market will be looking toward the USDA's weekly export sales report. They expect total US cotton sales will reach around 250,000 to 325,000 running bales (RBs, 500-lbs each).
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