Cotton futures hit a more-than one-week high on Thursday in their largest single-session gain since August 2012 after a US government report showed export sales of 144,900 bales in the prior week, well above market expectations. "The market just kind of caught fire here today," said Sharon Johnson, introducing broker with Wedbush Securities in Atlanta, Georgia, noting that mills had resumed buying after being absent much of the prior two weeks. "We had to come down a lot to get it to go back up."
Cotton contracts for July on ICE Futures US settled up by 2.53 cents on Thursday, a 4 percent gain, at 65.45 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 62.70 and 65.71 cents a pound. Weekly export sales reached 144,900 bales, according to data released on Thursday, with exports of 324,200 bales. * The front month's discount to the second-month spread rose 0.55 cent to 1.25 per pound. Total futures market volume rose by 19,752 to 47,460 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 415 to 168,081 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of April 22 totalled 70,198 480-lb bales, unchanged from the previous session, according to the most recent ICE data.
The dollar index was down 0.8 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 1.32 percent. Specs raised net long position to 38,775 from 28,126 in the latest week. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract rose to 57.841.
Comments
Comments are closed.