By Keith Brown, DTN Contributing Cotton Analyst 

The cotton market started this new week on Sunday night with a lower opening, and unfortunately ended that way Monday. Monday’s volume was quite muted (18,000), which is consistent with narrow ranges (0.81 cent). Some traders fear that the managed-money speculators have acquired a burdensome bullish position as evidenced by the commitment of traders report of last Friday.

That CFTC data revealed those traders are approaching their all-time high levels of contract ownership, which was 108,00-plus from January 2018. Obviously, for that group to stick to their “bullish guns,” prices need to trade higher.

A long-term positive for the market may be the shrinking world inventory. From Friday’s WASDE data we note that global ending stocks were 86.86 million bales, down from the August number of 87.23 million bales. This number was achieved by higher consumption offsetting higher production.

Supposedly three of the 12 New Orleans grain elevators are now operational. Hopefully traffic on the river can begin to return to some form of normalcy. Of course, that shipping may include cotton. Yet, we do underscore the shipping crisis that has been ongoing, occurring across the world. Suffice it to say, as world economies attempt to improve from COVID-10, fourth quarter freight rates are bound to be more expensive, and space hard to book.

For Monday, December settled at 92.81 cents, down 0.69 cent, March ended at 91.96 cents, down 0.77 cent and December 2022 ended at 82.26 cents, 0.33 cent lower; estimated volume was 22,738 contracts.