Aug 8 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures edged up on Tuesday to a near eight-week high on short-covering as markets await a key supply and demand estimates report on Thursday.
Cotton contracts for December settled up 0.58 cent, or 0.82 percent, at 71.13 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 70.18 and 71.19 cents a lb.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report and the weekly U.S. export sales data will be released on Thursday.
"People are viewing the markets with caution and positioning ahead of the WASDE report. The level of open interest contracting suggests that we are seeing some speculative short covering," said Louis Rose, co-founder and director of research and analytics at Rose Commodity Group. "Once we crossed the psychological level of 70 cents, we did not see tonnes of buying... don't think we are going to see any major buy orders till the WASDE report."
Total futures market volume fell by 299 to 18,921 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 224 to 216,963 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of August 7 totaled 22,338 480-lb bales, down from 22,977 in the previous session.
(Reporting by Nallur Sethuraman in Bengaluru; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
