ICE cotton futures edged lower on Wednesday as the market awaited a closely watched monthly crop supply and demand report, which is expected to reflect damages from the recent hurricanes in the United States. Cotton contracts for December settled down 0.22 cent, or 0.32 percent, at 68.73 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 68.46 and 69.45 cents a lb.
"There is a possibility that in (Thursday's) report the supply will be lower because of the hurricanes ... but there was some good weather compensating other areas, so we could expect prices to drop a bit more," said Gabriel Crivorot, an analyst at Societe Generale in New York. "Even though most people are not expecting some serious damage from the hurricanes, anything that confirms that it is not as bad as it could be would be a little bearish right now."
Volumes remained low ahead of the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report due on Thursday. Total futures market volume fell by 5,635 to 14,332 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 291 to 229,455 contracts in the previous session.
After the market close on Tuesday, the USDA in its weekly crop progress report rated 60 percent of the US cotton crop in good to excellent condition, up from 57 percent a week ago. It reported that 25 percent of the cotton crop was harvested in the United States by the week ended October 8, up from 17 percent in the previous week.
"Given that the WASDE release is tomorrow, this week's delayed crop condition/harvest progress report does not seem to have had any measured effect on the market," said Louis Rose, co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose Commodity. "Most expect the WASDE to show lower US and world aggregated ending stocks versus the September report, but they are by no means expected to be bullish projections." The agency had raised its US cotton output projections for the second straight month in its September WASDE report. It forecast 21.76 million bales production for the 2017-18 crop year.
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