Cotton futures end flat after hitting near one-week peak

Cotton futures end flat after hitting near one-week peak

Oct 10 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures settled flat on Tuesday after rising to near a one-week high on concerns about Texas weather, with the market awaiting a monthly crop supply and demand report from the U.S. government on Thursday.

Cotton contracts for December were unchanged from the previous session at 68.95 cents per lb. It earlier touched 69.88 cents a lb, the highest since Oct. 4.

"The market was little concerned about the Texas crop facing cold weather, but then it could not sustain the gains," said Peter Egli, director of risk management at British merchant Plexus Cotton. Egli said participation in the market was slow because traders are waiting for a U.S. Department of Agriculture report "to see if the crop is as big as everybody is anticipating or whether the quality is going to be as good as they are hoping."

The September World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report projected 21.76 million bales of U.S. cotton output for the 2017-2018 crop year, higher than the 20.55 million bales of production estimated in August.

Meanwhile, the USDA's weekly crop progress report on Tuesday showed 25 percent of cotton crop was harvested in the United States by the week ended Oct. 8, up from 17 percent in the previous week. It rated 60 percent of the U.S. cotton crop in good to excellent condition, up from 57 percent a week ago.

Total futures market volume rose by 4,981 to 19,882 lots. Data showed total open interest fell 197 to 229,746 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Oct. 9 totaled 5,445 480-lb bales, unchanged from 5,445 in the previous session. The dollar index was down 0.44 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index , which tracks 19 commodities, was up 1.24 percent.

(Reporting by Eileen Soreng in Bengaluru; editing by Grant McCool)

Source: Reuters
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