ICE cotton futures rebounded slightly on Friday after hitting a three-week low earlier in the session on the back of a bearish supply report from the US Department of Agriculture. Cotton contracts for December settled up 0.14 cent, or 0.21 percent, at 68.25 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 67.75 and 69.15 cents a lb. Earlier in the day, prices hit their lowest since July 21 at 67.75 cents.
The contract closed limit down and also registered its worst intraday decline on Thursday. "The first survey of US 2017 crop production indicates a crop of 20.5 million bales, 1.5 million above last month and the largest production in 11 years," the USDA said in its monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report released on Thursday.
"There was an element of disbelief (on Friday) in those numbers, but in the end the market did back off," said Keith Brown, principal at cotton broker Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia. USDA projected world 2017-18 ending stocks at 90.1 million bales, an increase of 1.4 million from the July forecast, and 100,000 above 2016-17.
"We will see if any kind of weather scare comes as a waiver. You could have a September hurricane or some hail storm in Texas ... Don't think the market is going to decline on a straight line, but over time, we will go down in the fall harvest," Brown said.
Total futures market volume fell by 16,323 to 27,613 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 41 to 221,587 contracts in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.40 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.39 percent.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of August 10 totaled 19,430 480-lb bales, down from 19,523 in the previous session. Meanwhile, speculators had increased their net long position in cotton, in the week to Aug. 8, by 11,018 contracts to 31,075 contracts, a six-week high, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday.