ICE cotton futures settled lower on Friday, but benchmark prices held close to seven-month highs as sustained speculative demand helped the March contract rise for a ninth straight week. Cotton contracts for March settled down 0.07 cent, or 0.09 percent, at 77.87 cents per lb after matching Thursday's all-time high for the contract at 78.07 cents earlier in the session.
"Yesterday, the price moved up sharply. Today the market is just consolidating. However, the market hasn't changed its outlook from yesterday," said Gabriel Crivorot, an analyst at Societe Generale in New York. The March contract rose 2.6 percent for the week. On, Thursday, the contract jumped 3 percent as benchmark prices hit a seven-month high.
"The market surged to another contract high this week, as a combination of spec and trade buying continued to chase values higher," Plexus Cotton said in a note. "We believe that the current bull run has little to do with the availability of cotton, but is instead the result of mills having accumulated a record amount of unfixed on-call sales."
Meanwhile, speculators hiked a bullish stance in cotton by 9,436 lots, to 92,038 lots, in the week to December 19, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday. That was the largest bullish stance in the fiber since May.
Meanwhile, total futures market volume fell by 14,251 to 24,613 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 5,095 to 272,331 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of December 21 totalled 47,628 480-lb bales, unchanged from the previous session.