ICE cotton futures fell for the fourth straight day on Thursday, hitting a four-week low after failing to maintain session highs hit immediately following the release of the US government's weekly export sales report, which traders said was supportive. "We just got a little overheated to the upside," said Keith Brown, a Moultrie, Georgia-based cotton trader. "There's a general malaise that's gripped this cotton market."
Cotton contracts for July settled down 0.42 cent on Thursday, a 0.7 percent loss, at 63.73 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 63.62 cents and 64.93 cents a pound. Net export sales for the week ended May 14 were 59,300 bales, up 22 percent from the prior week, according to data released Thursday by the US Department of Agriculture. The July contract's discount to December grew to 0.97 cent from 0.82 cent the prior session.
Total futures market volume fell by 1,647 to 27,500 lots. Data showed total open interest dropped by 2,069 to 185,550 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of May 20 totalled 110,484 480-lb bales, down from 126,880 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.12 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.61 percent. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 41.548.