Keith Brown DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst    

The cotton market spent most of Thursday's session in positive territory, but could never really inspire the big buyers to enter the fray. Thursday morning's long-awaited export-sales were deemed "confusing" in their presentation, and less than stellar in their amounts. It was what we think was a partial issuance. With that, roughly 275,000 bales were sold thus far in September, but the August data was absent.    

Energies fell sharply Thursday, as expectations of weaker demand and a strong U.S. dollar ahead of a potentially large interest rate increase next week outweighed supply concerns. The International Energy Agency said this week oil demand growth could "grind to a halt" in the fourth quarter. To date there has been a build of crude oil stocks.    

Friday, the CFTC will update the position held by the managed-money funds, via its Commitment of Traders report. Last week those traders were net sellers as the market crumbled, reducing their net long position to roughly 50,100 contracts. For context, their bullish peak this year was closer to 90,000 contracts.    

As the market heads into Friday, December cotton is down 1.55 cents on the week, down 9.92 cents for the month, but up 10.64 cents on the year.    

For Thursday, December closed at 103.29 cents, up 0.58 cents, March 2023 finished at 100.15 cents, up 0.57 cent and July 2023 settled at 94.84 cents, 0.28 cent higher; estimated volume was 16,925 contracts.    

Keith Brown can be reached at commodityconsults@gmail.com 

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