* Up 2.3 pct in two sessions, recovering Thursday's loss
* Fundamentals unchanged; another move down in price seen

NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Cotton futures in New York rose
again on Monday as speculative buying helped the market rebound
from a loss last week that was triggered by the bleakest U.S.
government crop report on cotton in decades.
Cotton's most actively traded contract on ICE Futures U.S.,
December, settled at 72.34 cents a pound, up 1.3 percent
on the day. It was the second day in a row that the market was
up; it finished 1 percent higher on Friday.
The two-day rise helped erase a tumble on Thursday, when the
December contract fell 2 percent after the U.S. Department of
Agriculture increased to a record high its 2012/13 global ending
stocks forecast for cotton.
The price rebound aside, few traders were willing to revise
their pessimistic outlook for cotton, saying the market had been
buoyed since Friday by speculators and nothing had fundamentally
changed.
"I think prices are just consolidating, getting in a range
of between 70 and 73 cents," said John Flanagan of Flanagan
Trading Corp in North Carolina. "This will probably continue a
little while longer but I suspect the next major move will be
down."
On Monday, December cotton traded between an intraday low of
71.09 and a high of 72.40.
At 3:20 p.m. EDT (1920 GMT), trading volumes on ICE Futures
U.S. stood at around 14,700 lots, down about 20 percent from the
30-day norm, data from Thomson Reuters showed.
Thursday's USDA report marked the third month in a row that
the agency had increased its estimates for global ending stocks
of cotton since the new marketing season started on Aug. 1.
The latest revision put ending stocks 14 percent higher than
2011/12's 69.56 million bales. It was the U.S. government's
most bearish report on cotton since the 1970s, said Sharon
Johnson, a cotton specialist at Knight Futures in Atlanta,
Georgia.