ICE cotton settled up slightly on Monday after spending most of the session in negative territory, pressured by expectations that a report set to be released later on Monday would show US farmers had made significant progress in planting their crops.
Louis Rose, independent cotton trader and consultant with Risk Analytics in Memphis, Tennessee, said prices had moved too high last week to attract buying interest in the near-term, and attributed the late-session price increase to "day traders taking profits before the end of the day." Cotton contracts for July on ICE Futures US settled up by 0.06 cent on Monday, a 0.1 percent gain, at 66.67 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 65.82 and 66.89 cents a pound, entirely within the prior session's range.
The cash to second-month spread remained unchanged at 0 per pound. * Total futures market volume fell by 9,365 to 19,436 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 659 to 193,901 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of May 1 totalled 85,949 480-lb bales, up from 82,275 in the previous session.
The dollar index was up 0.17 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.04 percent. Speculators raised their net long position to 39,680 from 23,056 in the latest week. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract rose to 59.901.