By Keith Brown DTN Cotton Correspondent 

The cotton market traded dramatically higher Wednesday as key technical support areas held early on, causing short-sold speculators to cover and bullish-leaning speculators to buy. The result was a near challenge of Monday’s huge reversal day. That old high stands 65.85 cents.

A majority of cotton’s main fundamentals slant negative. The 2019 crop is big at 21.65 million bales, the 2019 harvest is proceeding uninterrupted, no actual trade deal has been inked with China and now the U.S. is placing some tariffs on Turkey for its involvement in Syria. Turkey is a major importer of U.S. Cotton.

On the positive side, there is the potential for a tropical thing to develop in the Gulf of Mexico. If that does indeed form into a hurricane, it may pose a threat to current harvesting efforts. Additionally, the U.S. and Chinese negotiators will meet in Chile at the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference in early November. There the two sides will extend their talks and supposedly ink, at least, a phase one agreement. Currently, deputy negotiators are hammering out those provisions and language of that arrangement in time for that South American gathering.

For Wednesday, December cotton settled at 64.54 cents, up 1.01 cents, March ended at 65.19 cents, up 0.93 cent and December 2020 closed at 66.59 cents, up 0.62 cent. Estimated volume was 37,024 contracts