ICE cotton futures edged lower on Wednesday as the market turned bearish due to growing harvest pressure and as weather concerns waned in Texas, the top-producing US state. "We don't believe the market is bullish. We have a pretty strong crop coming in and the pipeline is filling quickly," said Louis Rose, co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose Commodity.
Cotton contracts for December settled down 0.23 cent, or 0.33 percent, at 69.31 cents per pound. It traded within a range of 69.12 to 69.9 cents. The contract rose over 4 percent on Monday, marking its largest one-day percentage gain, on concerns of crop damage due to freezing weather forecasts later in the week.
The market "is also looking at starting the scheduled index fund rolling of longs out of December ... It's going to be hard for the speculators to come in and build a big long position on the December contract," Rose added. Total futures market volume fell by 16,224 to 18,598 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 1,871 to 233,822 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Oct. 24 totalled 2,047 480-lb bales, down from 2,343 in the previous session. The market also awaited weekly export sales data from the US Department of Agriculture on Thursday.