Cotton futures loitered within the prior-session range for the second day in a row Friday and finished with a slight loss on thin volume.
Benchmark December closed off 32 points to 64.35 cents, around the lower quarter of its 83-point range from up 31 points at 64.98 to down 52 points at 64.15 cents. It managed a tiny 14-point gain for the week.
Volume slowed to an estimated 10,445 lots from 13,492 lots the previous session when spreads accounted for 2,965 lots or 22% and EFP 29 lots. Options volume totaled 850 calls and 2,116 puts.
Isolated to scattered thunderstorms are expected to develop Friday afternoon in the Texas High Plains. The strongest storms will be capable of producing locally heavy rainfall, wind gusts to 50 miles per hour and small hail, forecasters say.
Rainfall chances are listed at 20% each day through Sunday in the Lubbock area. Moisture could help some stressed dryland cotton to fill out bolls. A lack of subsoil moisture to help sustain a large acreage of dryland cotton this summer has become evident as the season progressed.
Lubbock has received 0.20 of an inch of rain this month, down from 1.21 inches a year ago, and 5.43 inches since June 1, compared with a normal of 5.8 inches and 6.25 inches last year.
Subsoil moisture was short to very short in 64% of the northern High Plains as of Sunday and in 84% of the southern district where the bulk of the dryland cotton is concentrated, according to the Texas field office of USDAΆs National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Meanwhile, mills fixed prices last week on 928 lots of on-call cotton in the December through May contracts and added 39 lots in July to reduce their 2014-15 unfixed holdings by a net 889 lots to 40,343, according to the latest data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Producers trimmed their unfixed December 2014-July 2015 on-call position by 372 lots to 24,491, resulting in the net call difference narrowing by 517 lots to 15,852. The net difference was 9.81% of the open interest, against 10.38% a week earlier.
In the December contract, mills priced 434 lots to shave their open call position there to 11,841 and producers fixed 497 lots to pare theirs to 21,970 lots. The net difference narrowed by 63 lots to 10,129, which was 8.56% of the declining December open interest.
The open call position of producers outweighed that of mills in December by a ratio of 1.86:1, while in the December through July 2015 contracts the total mill holdings exceeded those of producers by 1.65:1.
Separately, repayments on 11,152 bales reduced U.S. outstanding loans on 2013-crop upland cotton to 158,690 running bales, according to the latest USDA figures.
Upland loans outstanding included 17,881 bales of Form A issued to individual growers and 140,809 bales of Form G issued to marketing cooperatives or loan servicing agents.
Futures open interest dipped 94 lots Thursday to 166,398, with DecemberΆs down 1,097 lots to 114,874 and MarchΆs up 911 lots to 41,106. Cert stocks dropped 264 bales to 90,197.
World prices as measured by the Cotlook A Index fell 20 points Friday morning to 74.10 cents, narrowing the premium to FridayΆs December futures settlement by 15 points to 9.43 cents. For the week, the index gained 70 points.
