Benchmark cotton on ICE Futures US fell for the second straight session on Tuesday, matching the prior session's low in light trading after the release of a weekly report on crop progress amid a sharply stronger US dollar. "It's just been drifting lower," said Avery Putter, senior options broker with Sweet Futures in New Jersey, noting that cotton's current move toward the bottom of the recent trading range was consistent with a seasonal tendency for the price to dip steadily in low volume during the summer months.
ICE December cotton settled down by 0.36 cent on Tuesday, a 0.6 percent loss, at 63.64 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 63.37 and 64.25 cents a pound. Total futures market volume fell by 3,667 to 14,753 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 569 to 179,372 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of August 3 totalled 109,088 480-lb bales, down from 112,357 in the previous session.
A US government report released Monday after market close showed that 57 percent of bolls had set as of August 2, compared with 65 percent by the same time the year before and 64 percent on average between 2010 and 2014.
The dollar index was up 0.50 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.79 percent.
The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 40.738.