By Keith Brown DTN Cotton Correspondent
The cotton market traded lower but was able to mitigate much of its losses Monday. Spot March traded right down into support, halting at 73.15 cents, closing down less than 0.30 cent. For the most part, Monday’s bearish action was impacted by outside influences of a sharply lower Dow Jones, crude oil and Chicago Grains.
The Dow was down on poor outlooks from Caterpillar and Nvidia. Of course, the cotton market is keying on the U.S./China trade talks that commence this Wednesday.
It is hard to imagine a full resolution of each side trade differences will be reached, but at least the two sides will see how far apart they are and understand what compromise it will take to close the chasm.
In other news the U.S. government reopened Monday, and with it, USDA. It’s “rumored” USDA will bunch up the last five weeks of missed weekly sales and exports data and publish them all this Thursday. Such could result in a knee-jerk reaction.
Also, it was suggested, USDA for obvious reasons may skip the January supply-demand report and combine that data with the February crop report on Friday, February . Again the aforementioned information is conjecture.
The technical trend of the market is a minus three (-3), which is sideways to bearish. Naturally, the charts tend to reflect the prevailing or anticipated fundamentals. Although it’s widely acknowledged an agreement between the two nations is in the best interest of both, right now the trade talks could go either way.
March cotton settled at 73.85 cents, down 0.28 cent, July was at 76.64 cents, minus 0.23 cent and December finished at 74.28 cents, off 0.15 cent. Monday’s estimate volume of 19,700 contracts was the lowest amount this year.
