April 4 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures rose on Thursday,
ending three straight sessions of decline, supported by a strong
federal export sales report released earlier in the day.
* The front-month cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S.
,
settled up 0.27 cent, or 0.4 percent, at 77.32 cents per lb.
* It traded within a range of 76.85 and 77.8 cents a lb.
* "Data (weekly export sales) was very supportive and the
market
is showing us that," said Louis Rose, director of research and
analytics at Tennessee-based Rose Commodity Group.
* "Right now the supply in the U.S. - both new and old crop
- look
a lot more restricted, than it did a month ago."
* The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported net upland
sales of
322,100 running bales (RB) for 2018-19 up 47 percent from the
previous week.
* Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday
that
trade talks with China were going well and he would only accept
a "great" deal as negotiators hammered out differences ahead of
a meeting between Trump and China's vice premier later in the
day.
* Total futures market volume fell by 888 to 30,764 lots.
Data
showed total open interest gained 475 to 231,003 contracts in
the previous session.
* Certificated cotton stocks <CERT-COT-STX> deliverable as
of
April 3 totaled 39,345 480-lb bales, up from 34,569 in the
previous session.

(Reporting by Karthika Suresh Namboothiri in Bengaluru; editing
by Diane Craft)