ICE cotton plunges to near five-month low on export sales, technical selling

ICE cotton futures suffered their sharpest loss in nearly two months on Thursday after the release of an underwhelming weekly export sales report, falling for the fourth straight session to their lowest levels in nearly five months. "I thought the market had come down some and there might be a little business," Jobe Moss, a broker with MCM Inc in Lubbock, Texas, said on his expectations for a stronger export sales report.
"I wasn't expecting a negative, and I don't think the market was either." The weekly US export sales report showed a net cancellation of 14,200 bales of cotton from the 2014/15 crop last week, led by a 10,300-bale cancellation from Turkey. The report showed net sales of 123,900 bales for the 2015/16 crop year, including 46,200 bales from Turkey. Cotton contracts for December settled down by 1.26 cent on Thursday, a 2 percent loss, to 62.26 cents per pound, after falling as low as 62.10 cents a lb, the contract's lowest level since March 18. That marked its sharpest single-session loss since June 11.
Total futures market volume rose by 26,163 to 39,316 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 1,173 to 180,979 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of August 5 totalled 105,074 480-lb bales, down from 105,951 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.12 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.62 percent. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 33.444.