ICE cotton futures rose to their highest level in more than two weeks on Friday, poised to end a three-week losing streak as traders covered short positions after data began trickling in, with a softer dollar lending additional support.
* Cotton contracts for March (CTH6) rose 0.24 cent, or 0.4%, at 64.81 cents per lb at 11:36 a.m. ET (16:36 GMT), hitting its highest level since November 14. The contract was on track for a 1.6% weekly gain.
* "Open interest has been declining on up days, shorts are being lifted as data slowly starts to reveal the current structural and fundamental situation, which seems optimistic," said Valentin Olah, a risk management consultant at StoneX.
* The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its export sales report for the week ended October 16, showing 175,700 running bales (RB) in 2025/26, with 179,300 RB of new sales.
* The backlog of data was due to the 43-day U.S. government shutdown, the longest in history, which ended on November 12.
* The U.S. dollar was heading for its worst weekly performance since late July as traders increased bets that the Federal Reserve will cut rates again next month. A weaker dollar makes greenback-priced cotton more affordable for overseas buyers.
* "Cotton prices are set to end the year rangebound with a small degree of positivity as it feels saturated with the bad news," Olah added.
* The market will close early at 1:30 p.m. ET on Friday.
* In other markets, Wall Street's main indexes climbed, while futures trading came back to life following a CME Group outage that had temporarily frozen currencies, commodities and equity contracts around the globe. While Brent crude oil futures were flat, U.S. crude futures ticked higher as drawn-out Russia-Ukraine peace talks kept geopolitical risks elevated and traders kept an eye on Sunday's OPEC+ meeting for clues about potential output changes.