ICE cotton futures were nearly unchanged on Wednesday in thin trade ahead of this week's US export sales and planting data, with a large harvest expected. Cotton contracts for December settled down 0.06 cent, or 0.09 percent, at 67.65 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 66.84 and 67.89 cents a lb. Prices touched a near 10-month low of 66.15 cents on Tuesday.
"We got a bit of downside earlier in the day on expectations of acreage report, where we might see more acres of cotton planted," said Louis Rose, co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose Commodity Group. Total futures market volume fell by 3,600 to 15,058 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 62 to 200,457 contracts in the previous session.
"The speculators don't want to contribute and they are probably not going to be in this market until the acreage report," Rose said. While the US weekly cotton export sales data is due on Thursday, the acreage report is due Friday. For the week ending June 25, US Department of Agriculture had rated 57 percent of the US crop in good or excellent condition, off 4 percentage points from the previous week. Cotton rated in poor, or worse condition was estimated at 10 percent.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of June 27 totaled 314,986 480-lb bales, down from 378,117 in the previous session.