Cotton futures tumble

Cotton futures fell on Wednesday despite a sharply weaker dollar and strength elsewhere in the commodity complex as investors hesitated to increase long positions ahead of the looming index fund roll, when large funds move positions forward from the front-month. "They don't have a long time to build up a significant long," said Louis Rose, independent cotton trader and consultant with Risk Analytics in Memphis, Tennessee.
March cotton on ICE Futures US settled down 0.36 cent, or 0.58 percent, at 61.94 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 61.77 and 62.59 cents a lb. Total futures market volume fell by 4,576 to 43,027 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 2,126 to 197,632 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of February 2 totalled 26,614 480-lb bales, down from 27,784 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 1.70 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 2.50 percent.