Benchmark March cocoa futures settled down 1.5 percent on Tuesday amid heavy volume and speculative liquidation, traders said. "I think the market is either shaking off slightly overbought conditions or, after the specs buy, who's left to buy it?" one trader said, referring to a recent wave of speculative buying that had firmed prices.
New York Board of Trade's (NYBoT) benchmark March cocoa fell $25 at $1,606 per tonne, in a trading band from $1,593 to $1,611. May closed down $24 at $1,637, dealing from $1,625 to $1,642. The other contracts settled down $22 to $24. There was some speculative buying at the session's low, preventing deeper losses, traders said.
Cocoa volume estimated near the close was 18,134 lots, compared to Friday's official tally by NYBOT at 13,265. NYBoT was closed on Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.
In London, cocoa futures traded down on light speculative selling, dealers said. Liffe's benchmark March cocoa futures contract fell 10 pounds to 875 pounds per tonne, trading in a range from 871 to 885 pounds, while May slipped 10 pounds to 891 pounds, after trading in a band from 888 to 900. The NYBoT market appeared to shrug off top cocoa-grower Ivory Coast's most recent arrival figures.
Cocoa arrivals at ports in Ivory Coast reached around 704,000 tonnes from October 1 to January 14, a rough estimate by exporters showed on Monday, compared with 788,038 tonnes delivered in the same period a year ago. Ivory Coast is the world's largest cocoa producer and Ghana is the second.
Ivory Coast's October-March main cocoa crop is expected to reach 930,000 tonnes, below last year's figure of 966,686 tonnes, the West African country's Coffee and Cocoa Bourse (BCC) said on Tuesday. Workers at Ghana's Takoradi port began unloading a queue of hundreds of cocoa trucks on Monday after a strike ended, the Cocobod regulator and union officials said on Monday.
Ghana's Cocobod cocoa industry regulator expects a 2006/07 crop of around 700,000 tonnes, down from 740,000 tonnes last season, Deputy Chief Executive for Operations Charles Ntim said on Monday.
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