Arabica coffee and US cocoa futures corrected lower early on Wednesday, after fund buying that recently pushed prices higher dried up, traders said. "You don't see any evidence of the hedge fund, black box or index community in the way of buyers that you've seen in the last five or six days, so that's lending itself to some complacency," one trader said.
On the electronic platform, the key March coffee contract dropped 1.05 cents at $1.358 at 9:17 am EST (1417 GMT), moving from $1.3535 to $1.369. The rest were down from 0.85 to 1.10 cent.
On the screen, the ICE March cocoa contract was down $42, or 1.9 percent, at $2,144 per tonne at 9:20 am, trading from $2,132 to $2,186. The rest were down from $17 to $46. In top producer Ivory Coast, cocoa exporters said they had lowered estimates for production in the October-March main crop season to just over 1 million tonnes from 1.1 million previously.