ICE cotton futures settled little changed on Tuesday, as market participants awaited news of whether rains later this month could disrupt harvest activities and eyed the Federal Reserve's meeting later this week. "Unless we get a weather scare, it's stuck in here," said one California cotton merchant, referring to the fibre's tight trading range.
The US Department of Agriculture raised its forecast for world inventories by the end of the year, which, coupled with a stronger US dollar, has limited cotton's upside, said Sterling Terrell, a commodity trading adviser in Lubbock, Texas. December cotton on ICE Futures US settled down by 0.03 cent on Tuesday at 62.52 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 62.33 and 62.87 cents a pound. Total futures market volume fell by 3,064 to 13,704 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 606 to 178,451 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Sept. 14 totalled 57,423 480-lb bales, down from 58,358 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.37 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.07 percent. Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 40.990.