Keith Brown DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst    

After being pounded sharply lower for multiple days, cotton finally snapped higher Friday. Helping the fiber market rally was a surging Dow Jones, plus an imploding U.S. dollar. The high/low range for spot December was 4.13 cents.    

Friday afternoon, the CFTC will issue its weekly commitment of traders report. Last week the managed-money funds netted some 26,000 contracts. For context, they were net long 96,000 contracts on Oct. 8, 2021.    

On Monday, USDA will update the harvest progress for the 2022 crop. This past Monday, the agency reported the crop was 37% gathered versus a five-year harvest pace of 32%.    Next week, USDA will issue its latest update for export sales. From the last report, we note that cumulative sales for 2022-23 have reached 8.370 million bales. Last year that pace was 8.009 million bales. The five-year average stands at 8.513 million. U.S. sales have reached 69% of the marketing forecast versus a five-year average of 59.5%.    

A private commodities research company has issued an early-acres forecast for the 2023 season. The report suggested a million-acre increase for soybeans, 4 million more acres for corn, but a million-acre decline for cotton.    

As this week concludes, the numbers show December cotton is off 4.02 cents for the week, down 6.21 cents on the month and down 13.52 cents for the year.    

For Friday, December closed at 79.13 cents, up 1.73 cents, March 2023 finished at 78.55 cents, up 1.29 cents and July 2023 settled at 77.08 cents, 0.84 cent higher; estimated volume was 43,743 contracts.    

Keith Brown can be reached at commodityconsults@gmail.com 

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