By Keith Brown, DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst 

The cotton market managed a higher, albeit sleepy, close Friday. The “sleepy” reference is all about the slow volume. All week, the market’s volume has been on a daily decline, with Friday’s session boasting the fewest contracts traded. We think the diminished volume suggests traders are too hesitant to add new positions against the impending acres report of next week.

Wednesday, June 30, USDA will issue its long-awaited acres report. Thus far, the average pre-report guess stands at 11.856 million acres, within a range of 11.5 million to 12.4 million acres. The government had previously pegged 2021 acres at 12.036 million estimated in March and versus 12.093 million last year. Still, many industry people believe even the 11.28 million estimate is too high versus corn and beans.

On Monday, USDA will issue its weekly crop progress report. Traders may see the “other half” of the weather story, which punished much of the Delta last week. Then the Planted Acres report is on Wednesday, followed by Thursday’s Weekly export-sales report at 8:30am.

For the week, December cotton ended up 2.00 cents, so far for the month, it’s up 3.86 cents, and for the year, 13.48 cents higher.

For Friday, July closed at 86.43 cents, up 0.40 cent, December settled at 87.18 cents, up 0.45 cent and March 2022 ended at 86.71 cents, 0.32 cent higher; estimated volume was 12,047 contracts.