ICE cotton futures climbed to a two-week high on Wednesday helped by short covering ahead of the monthly crop supply and demand report from the US government. Cotton contracts for March settled up 0.4 cent, or 0.58 percent, at 68.86 cents per lb. Earlier in the session the contract touched 69.32 cents a lb, the highest since Oct. 25.
"The prices were up on short covering," said Keith Brown, principal at cotton brokers Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia. "The November crop report is out tomorrow and the average guess is it will be a couple of hundred thousand bales below last month," Brown added.
US cotton output was seen at 21.12 million bales for 2017-18 as per the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report released in October. The US Department of Agriculture's WASDE report and export sales data are due on Thursday. Total futures market volume rose by 3,962 to 61,053 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 1,051 to 235,937 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Nov. 7 totalled 39,322 480-lb bales, up from 34,322 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.06 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.02 percent.