Cotton futures closed sharply higher Thursday on speculative and trade buying as players braced for release of a key government crop report, brokers said. ICE Futures US benchmark December cotton contract went up the 4.00-cent limit to finish at $1.0375 per lb, the highest close for the second position cotton contract in a week. The session low was at 99.64 cents.
Back contracts posted gains from 0.83 cent to 2.03 cents. The US Agriculture Department's monthly supply/demand report will be released Friday at 8:30 am EDT (1230 GMT). The cotton trade is anxious to see if USDA raises its estimate of US cotton exports and production figures for top consumer China, No 2 producer India and flood-hit Pakistan.
Total volume traded hit 30,642 lots at 2:53 pm EDT (1853 GMT), about two-thirds above the 30-day average at 18,305 lots, preliminary Thomson Reuters data showed. Ron Lawson, an analyst at brokers logicadvisors.com in Sonoma, California, said fibre contracts jumped when a large block of speculative orders forced trade accounts to pile in as well, triggering a "domino effect" of buying in the market. He said the underlying structure of the market remained bullish and that cotton got a further boost from the weekly export sales report from the US Agriculture Department.
USDA said total US cotton sales hit 647,000 running bales (RBs, 500-lbs each), the fourth consecutive week that sales topped 500,000 RBs. Lawson said most of the sales were booked while cotton was rallying to its highest level in 15 years. The advance was fuelled by strong demand, tight stocks and buying by funds who believed cotton was undervalued.
Brokers Flanagan Trading Corp sees resistance in the December cotton contract at $1.0385, with support at $1.026 and $1.0135. Volume traded Wednesday reached 13,569 lots from the prior tally of 28,039 lots, according to data from ICE Futures US Open interest in the cotton market stood at 231,203 lots as of October 6, ICE Futures US data showed.
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