Improved weather for boll maturation forecast for the Texas Plains. Classing at Corpus slowed to 103,591 bales. Mills added 525 on-call lots in December.
Cotton futures traded below unchanged most of the day and finished slightly lower in quiet, low-volume dealings Friday.
Benchmark December closed down 44 points to 67.28 cents, snapping a string of three higher settlements in a row and finishing in the lower quarter of its 108-point range from up 40 points at 68.12 to down 68 points at 67.04 cents. It lost 180 points for the week.
October dropped 64 points to close at 67.74 cents, March dipped 30 points to 67.61 cents and December 2017 fell 35 points to 67.97 cents.
A strong U.S. dollar index, which had posted an 11-session high and traded up 0.798 to 96.080 near the cotton close, may have contributed to negative sentiment in cotton.
Volume dwindled to an electronically estimated 8,800 lots from 11,509 lots the previous session when spreads accounted for 3,510 lots or 31%.
The low volume may have been linked partly to traders looking ahead to USDAΆs weekly crop progress and conditions report — due after the close Monday — to perhaps help clarify some uncertainties on the effects on cotton of tropical storms this month in the Southeast and rains and subnormal temperatures in the Texas Plains.
Improved conditions are foreseen for boll maturation on the Texas High Plains next week under sunny skies and warm temperatures. Daytime highs at Lubbock are forecast up to the low 90s and nighttime lows around the mid-60s. No rain is in the forecast from Sunday through Thursday.
Classing slowed to 103,591 running bales at Corpus Christi during the week ended Thursday from 132,331 RB the previous week. This raised the seasonΆs total to 632,111 RB, up from 295,024 there a year ago.
Tenderable cotton declined to 69.1% for the week and 81.2% for the season, down from 77.8% and 83.6%, respectively, the prior week. A year ago, tenderable cotton accounted for 70.1%. The beltwide total classed then was 298,134 RB, including 2,532 RB at Rayville and 578 RB at Dumas.
Meanwhile, mills added 525 lots to their unpriced on-call position in December last week and producers priced 357 lots, according to the latest data reported by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The unfixed positions rose to 24,853 lots on the mill side and dipped to 13,084 lots on the producer side. This narrowed the net call difference by 882 lots to 11,769, which was 7.61% of DecemberΆs open interest. The unpriced mill position outweighed that of producers by a ratio of 1.9:1.
Elsewhere, mills added 1,093 lots in March, 414 lots in May, 573 in July, 403 in December 2017 and 239 in March 2018 to increase their unpriced position across the board by 3,193 lots to 73,063.
Producers overall priced a net 322 lots, shaving their total unfixed position to 23,308 lots. The two largest changes beyond December were the pricing of 73 lots in March and the addition of 179 lots in December 2017.
Futures open interest edged up 280 lots Thursday to 231,619, with DecemberΆs down 71 lots to 152,861 and MarchΆs up 84 lots to 48,964. Certified stocks grew 270 bales to 34,588.
