For the week ending Friday, September 30, ICE cotton futures slid 10+ cents (see chart above courtesy of Barchart.com). The Dec’22 contact flirted with its July lows, and is now down to where the Dec’23 was being judged as unprofitably low only a couple of months ago.  Dec’22 settled Friday at 85.34 cents per pound, while new crop Dec’23 settled at 74.85 cents per pound.  The latter is at an increasing disadvantage to competing new crop feedgrain and wheat prices.   Chinese cotton prices and the A-Index were mixed-to-lower this week.

Cotton-specific influences this week included a continuation of very light-to-moderate demand in inactive/slow physical trading. Weekly export sales continued weak, with cancellations, while actual export shipments were sub-par level.  The Cotton Belt saw widespread clear weather this week except for South Texas and the southeastern states being impacted by Hurricane Ian.  U.S. boll opening progress was ahead of schedule while harvest progress roughly matched the historical pace.

The pattern of ICE cotton futures open interest was steadily rising this week, while price settlements were mostly lower (suggesting new short selling).  Indeed, the regular Tuesday snapshot of speculative positioning (through September 27) showed 1,006 new hedge fund shorts, reinforced by 183 liquidated hedge fund longs and 676 liquidated index fund longs, week over week.

CBOT new crop corn and soybean futures both had a mostly sideways pattern across the week, with corn sharply higher on Friday with soybeans sharply lower.  KC wheat futures had a gradual uptrend this week. The U.S. dollar index peaked at 20+ year highs owing to higher treasury bond yields and hawkish Federal Reserve influences.

For more details and data on Old Crop and New Crop fundamentals, plus other near term influences, follow these links (or the drop-down menus above) to those sub-pages.