By Keith Brown, DTN Cotton Correspondent
The cotton market ended its Friday session mixed with old crop contracts slightly lower, while new crop fractionally higher. This week saw the market still smarting from last week’s USDA supply-demand data, which was viewed bearish by he trade. In that report, U.S. carry was increased to 6.7 million bales, and world inventories shot to 91 million-plus bales.
However, this week’s “bad day” was Thursday as weekly export sales revealed a huge net negative number of 183,000 bales. Most of the top U.S. customers, including China, Pakistan, India and Vietnam, all canceled previous orders. Next week’s agenda will include Monday’s planting progress report, followed by weekly export sales Thursday.
Then on Friday, May cotton enters its delivery period. Thus, all producers having cash positions tied to spot May must either fix or roll those contracts into the July Market.
Another negative for cotton on Friday was China’s reporting that its quarterly GDP number was off nearly 7%. Of course, that contraction of commence is directly related to the adverse effects of coronavirus.
For the week, May cotton was down 1.67 cents. For the month, it is up 1.67 cents, but for the year it remains down 17.31 cents.
For Friday, spot May closed at 52.77 cents, down 0.02 cent, July ended at 52.86 cents, down 0.16 cent, but December finished at 55.26 cents, up 0.30 cent.