Nov 1 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures inched lower on Wednesday as concerns of crop damage in Texas due to freezing weather conditions waned, ahead of weekly export data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Cotton contracts for December settled down 0.21 cent, or 0.31 percent, at 68.17 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 68.1 and 69.05 cents a lb.
"The freeze in west Texas was not as deep and as widespread as first thought," said Keith Brown, principal at cotton brokers Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia, adding, "although we may have guessed that on Sunday night, it's right now that we are starting to get some assessments out of the fields."
Also the harvest, which is almost 50 percent gathered, is pressuring the market back down again, Brown added. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's weekly crop progress report showed 46 percent of cotton crop was harvested in the United States by the week ended Oct. 29, up from 37 percent in the previous week. Meanwhile, the market awaited the release of weekly U.S. export sales data due on Thursday.
Total futures market volume rose by 7,977 to 36,275 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 1,706 to 234,118 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Oct. 31 totaled 1,711 480-lb bales, down from 2,031 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.25 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index , which tracks 19 commodities, was up 0.20 percent.
(Reporting by Eileen Soreng in Bengaluru; editing by Diane Craft)