ICE cotton edges lower on poor export sales data

Cotton futures settled down slightly lower on Thursday after disappointing US government data on weekly export sales. The data showed sales of upland cotton totaled 48,700 running bales for the week ending April 22, touching a marketing-year low for 2015/2016, down 54 percent from the previous week.
"It was something of a moral victory considering the poor sales numbers. The market could have used it as an excuse to go down but it choose not to," said Keith Brown, proprietor and cotton trader at Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia. The presence of China, which will begin auctioning its massive stockpile of the natural fiber starting next week, among the buyers from the US was "supportive" to the market, Brown added. The July cotton contract on ICE Futures US settled down 0.46 cent, or 0.72 percent, at 63.69 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 63.3 and 64.22 cents a lb. Total futures market volume fell by 1,952 to 18,715 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 1,208 to 190,508 contracts in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.73 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.37 percent.