Keith Brown DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst    

The cotton market ended Thursday with double-digit gains. Fiber prices were encouraged higher by another positive weekly export-sales report, a strong GDP, plus higher grains and energies markets.    

Friday afternoon, the CFTC will present its weekly commitments-of-traders report. At last count, the managed-funds were net short some 1900 contracts, their first such position since 2020. Since that time, the cotton market has graduated higher, so the data ought to be interesting.    

Next week, traders will be keying on the Federal Reserve meeting. It is expected that the central bank will hike interest rates 25 basis points on Wednesday. Of course, next week is also the end of the month, thus some position squaring will be seen. To that end, there has been a ton of farmer fixations occurring so that operating lines can be settled and then re-upped for 2023.    

Heading into Friday's session, spot March is up 0.80 cent on the week, and 4.13 cents higher on the month and year respectively.    

Thursday, March 2023 finished at 87.50 cents, up 0.84 cent, July settled at 88.34 cents, up 0.63 cent and December 2023 ended at 85.92 cents, 0.39 cent higher; estimated volume was 33,851 contracts.    

Keith Brown can be reached at commodityconsults@gmail.com (c) Copyright 2023 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.