NEW YORK, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Cotton futures finished with
small losses Friday on sales by small speculators and due to
the weak tone of outside markets, with most players sidelined
by the long holiday weekend, analysts said.

The cotton market was shut Thursday for Thanksgiving.
Trading ended an hour earlier than the normal closing time of 2
p.m. EST (1900 GMT) on Friday.

The key March cotton futures shed 0.04 cent to end
at 90.87 cents per lb, after trading between 90.01 and 91.89
cents.

For the week, the market was down almost 2.5 percent.
Total volume traded Friday was a little over 6,500 lots,
almost three quarters below the 30-day norm, preliminary
Thomson Reuters data showed.

'It's very thin,' said Sharon Johnson, senior cotton
analyst at commodity brokerage Penson Futures in Atlanta.

U.S. stocks were up but the market was still seemingly
headed for its worst week in two months on crimped holiday
trading and fears that Europe's debt crisis lacked a unified
response.

China, the world's top producer and consumer of cotton, was
again the biggest buyer of U.S. cotton in the U.S. Agriculture
Department's weekly export sales report -- which was released
on Friday due to Thursday's Thanksgiving holiday.

China bought 757,700 running bales (RBs, 500-lbs each),
bringing total purchases over the last three weeks to over 2.3
million RBs of cotton.

'Cotton remained weak because aside from China, there are
no other buyers of note in the market,' a dealer said.
Open interest in the cotton market, usually taken as an
indicator of investor exposure in the market, stood at 136,858
lots as of Nov 23, from the prior session's tally of 137,106
lots, exchange data showed.

Total volume traded Wednesday in the market reached 14,825
lots, from the previous tally of 24,770 lots, ICE futures U.S.
data said.