By Keith Brown, DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst 

The cotton market ended Thursday slightly down. During the session, the market did trade higher, in sympathy with other outside markets, but at the end of the day — knowing harvest was basically back underway — it retreated. A couple of outside positives on Thursday were the bullishly surging Dow Jones and the collapsing dollar. The driving force for those two polar opposite moves was the notion of a democrat win. Weekly export sales were essentially benign as sales lower than the prior week, but shipments higher. Pakistan was in as the number two buyer.

Into Friday, the market will continue to monitor the undecided presidential election, the 2020 harvesting efforts and the jobs report. Expectations are for 660,000 non-farm jobs versus last month’s 661,000 jobs. The unemployment rate is expected to fall to 7.7% down from October’s 7.9%.

Also ahead of Friday’s session, spot December cotton stands up 1.15 cents on the week and the month, but down 0.29 cent on the year. Thursday, December cotton closed at 70.07 cents, down 0.16 cent, March settled at 71.21 cents, up 0.02 cent and December 2021 finished at 69.52 cents, 0.11 cent lower. Estimated volume was 37,191 contracts.