Market ebbed and flowed as hurricane wobbled. Mills priced 631 on-call December lots. U.S. outstanding upland loans rose to 218,439 RB.
Cotton futures settled lower for the third session in a row Friday, with benchmark December finishing on its lowest close since Sept. 13.
December closed down 52 points to 66.98 cents, near the low of its 119-point range from up 60 points at 68.10 to down 59 points at 66.91 cents, holding just above the prior-day low. For the week, December lost 110 points.
March dropped 48 points to close at 67.62 cents, while December 2017 fell 45 points to settle at 68.09 cents.
Volume dipped to an estimated 19,942 lots from 20,200 lots the previous session when spreads accounted for 5,706 lots or 28%, EFP 14 lots and EFS 18 lots. Options volume totaled 1,014 calls and 1,733 puts.
Cotton-trader emotions have ebbed and flowed this week with small fluctuations in the projected path of Hurricane Matthew, which scraped FloridaΆs Atlantic coast early Friday after it was downgraded overnight to a Category 3 storm. Its path had shifted a bit to the east.
Slight deviations in the projected path of the storm can make major differences in its impact, forecasters have said. The cotton market reacted as the storm wobbled to the left and to the right.
The storm was expected to continue moving north along hundreds of miles of coastline, with parts of the Carolinas considered the most vulnerable to potential cotton damage from torrential rains into Sunday.
Meanwhile, mills priced 631 on-call lots in December last week and producers added 15 lots, according to the latest data reported by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
This resulted in unpriced positions slipping to 24,346 lots on the mill side and edging up to 12,399 lots on the producer side. The net call difference declined 646 lots to 11,947 (1.19 million bales), which was 7.5% of the open interest, compared with 7.6% a week earlier.
The unfixed mill position outweighed that of producers by a ratio of 1.96:1, compared with 2.02:1 the previous week.
Elsewhere, mills added 718 lots in March, 794 lots in May, 1,303 lots in July and 841 lots in December 2017. Producers priced 77 lots in March, five lots in May and 26 lots in July, while adding 1,235 lots in December 2017.
Across the board, mills added a net 3,441 lots to raise their unpriced position to 80,282 lots and producers added a net 1,032 lots to hike theirs to 24,961 lots.
Separately, U.S. 2016-crop upland outstanding loans rose by 31,127 running bales to 218,395 during the week ended Monday, according to the latest USDA figures. Entries were 54,370 RB and repayments were made on 23,243 RB. Texas cotton under loan was 189,168 RB, 87% of the total.
Futures open interest declined 1,074 lots Thursday to 247,142, with DecemberΆs down 1,031 lots to 155,535 and MarchΆs up 243 lots to 57,279. Cert stocks grew 447 bales to 31,083.
