By Keith Brown, DTN Cotton Correspondent

It was another coronavirus crush day as the Dow Jones collapsed nearly another 1,000 points. Such volatility absolutely scares away would-be buyers across all markets, and to that end, the cotton market spiked to nearly limit-down levels. In fact, the cotton market is not that far from its harvest lows of 2019.

Thursday, the market ignored very strong exports-sales data in the morning’s weekly report. Even though combined sales were over 400,000-plus bales, and China was in the mix as an old crop buyer, the cotton market could not decouple from the super-bearish cloud cast by the Dow Jones and related financial markets.

March cotton remains in is delivery process. There were 26 notices issued Thursday. All were stopped by term commodities.

On Monday, the market settled below the 200-day moving average. While this indicator is difficult to trade, many traders follow it. Thus, we may be seeing a huge about face move with the speculators. That is, those managed-money traders may have moved from net long to a net short position. Friday afternoon, the CFTC will issue its commitment-of-traders data with a breakdown of where trader stand in relation to the market.

For Thursday, May cotton closed at 62.50 cents, down 2.97 cents, July ended at 63.28 cents, down 2.80 cents and December finished at 63.25 cents, down 2.59 cents. Estimated volume was 67,859 contracts.