NEW YORK, Oct 6 (Reuters) - Cotton futures settled higher
Thursday for the fourth straight session on investor buying as
the market tested the upper end of its 10-day trading band,
analysts said.

The key December cotton contract on ICE Futures U.S.
added 0.43 cent to end at $1.0273 per lb, trading from $1.0165
to $1.035. The market has not strayed from its 10-day long
trading range of 98.25 cents to $1.0355.

Total volume traded Thursday hit almost 7,400 lots, almost
50 percent under the 30-day norm, preliminary Thomson Reuters
data showed.

'We're still confined to the range of the last 10
sessions,' said independent cotton analyst Mike Stevens in
Mandeville, Louisiana.

The market would need to break out of that range to
generate any meaningful activity in fiber contracts, he added.

Dealers said the contract must finish above $1.04 and then
move through resistance all the way up to the $1.09 level to
confirm a topside breakout.

The market barely reacted to the weekly export sales report
of the U.S. Agriculture Department which showed net upland
cotton sales in 2011/12 at 88,600 running bales (RBs, 500-lbs
each). U.S. cotton export shipments hit 69,800 RBs.

Stevens said both sales and export shipments were
'mediocre' but the market took scant notice and moved higher.

Traders said there are some lingering concerns about the
cotton crop in the U.S. and Pakistan after drought and floods
hit both countries, respectively.

Open interest in cotton, usually taken as an indicator of
investor exposure in cotton, stood at 152,631 lots as of Oct 5,
from 151,858 lots on Oct 4, the exchange said.

Total volume traded Wednesday in the cotton market reached
9,780 lots, sharply down from the previous tally of 23,740
lots, ICE Futures U.S. data showed.