December cotton closed slightly lower Monday. Estimated volume was 15,000 contracts traded. News of China’s cool shoulder towards a potential trade meeting with the U.S. this week quickly had the ICE futures playing defense earlier in the session. In fact, for a moment the December market appeared as if it was going violate last week’s low of 7790.

However, bullish speculators emerged and helped steady the trade. Still, Monday’s trading range amounted to less than 100 points. Although the 2018 cotton harvest is beginning to unfold, most producers across the South are currently concentrating on gathering their peanut crop.

Soon enough, however, cotton harvest will bring in hedge-type selling. Then, cotton’s pipeline fills, and speculators may decide to lighten their bullish load some more. Seasonally, there have been some epic lows seen in past cotton markets during October-November.

This afternoon at 4 p.m. EDT, USDA will release its latest crop harvest/crop condition data. It is the latter part of that report traders are keenly interested, as they hope to see how much damage befell the mid-Atlantic states.

Weather-wise, the six-to-ten day U.S. forecast has much of the cotton belt with above-normal temperatures and below-normal rainfall. Internationally, the Punjab province of India is inundated with copious amounts of rain, damaging some of that crop.

December cotton settled at 7858, down 55; March was 7896, also down 55; and December 19 finished 7618, down 42.