Raw sugar futures bounded to a higher close on Wednesday as late investor short covering powered an advance as the market recovered from a recent sell-off in the commodity sector, brokers said. The ICE Futures May electronic sugar contract rose 0.25 cent to end at 11.77 cents per lb, trading from 11.41 to 11.84 cents.
Volume traded in the contract stood at 29,933 lots at 2:32 pm EDT (1832 GMT). "It was beaten down a little bit so you kind of expected it to bounce today. We could see some follow-through (buying) tomorrow from the way it ended up, but I don't know if it will last," a trading house dealer said.
Fundamentally, the market is in the process of sorting out several market factors. Sugar must wrestle with a surplus, a high level of stocks, the steady rise of consumption demand and how much of the cane in countries like Brazil will go into the manufacture of the alternate fuel ethanol, industry followers said.