By Keith Brown, DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst 

The cotton market finished its Wednesday’s session markedly higher as positive outside markets were encouraging to buyers. To that end, cotton saw mill-type fixation buying, as well as some speculative bargain hunting. On Monday, the market collapsed some 3.00 cents amid certain Chinese financial news, but since that time with that problem somewhat ebbing, cotton has gained back 2.00 cents.

Additionally, the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday afternoon that it was keeping interest rates steady but indicated tapering would begin “soon.” Some analysts see the post-Thanksgiving period as that optimum time. At any rate, the U.S. dollar fell, while gold rallied.

Thursday morning, USDA will present its weekly export-sales data. Sales have basically been averaging 300,000 or so bales, with last week’s sales at 285,000. Of late, China has been the dominant buyer.

With Monday’s price collapse, some analysts are of the opinion that significant technical damage was done to cotton’s long-standing trend. Those traders now favor selling technical bounces; the fact that open interest is super high and that the managed-money funds are heavily net-long, they may have reasons to do so.

For Wednesday, December settled at 90.87 cents, up 0.84 cent, March ended at 90.11 cents, up 0.77 cent and December 2022 ended at 81.00 cents, 0.29 cent higher; estimated volume was 18,015 contracts.