For the week ending Friday, November 11, ICE cotton futures gyrated sideways over a three-plus cent range, appearing to level off from the previous week’s sharp rally (see chart above courtesy of Barchart.com).  On Friday the most active Mar’23 contract settled up 1.77 cents at 86.33 cents per pound.  The Dec’23 settled at 79.56 cents per pound, up 119 points over the previous Friday.  Chinese cotton prices and the A-Index were more also across the week.

Cotton-specific influences this week included a continuation of very light-to-moderate demand in inactive/slow physical trading. USDA supplied fairly neutral monthly adjustments to their U.S. and world cotton supply and demand forecasts.  Weekly export sales continued decent while actual export shipments remained sub-par level.  U.S. harvest both progressed ahead of  the historical pace.

ICE cotton futures open interest had a declining pattern this week, while price settlements were mixed.  The regular Tuesday snapshot of speculative positioning (through November 1) shows the peak of the build-up of the hedge fund net short position:  1,083 more hedge fund longs and 490 new index fund longs, week over week, both of which were outweighed by 7,860 new hedge fund shorts since the prior week.  We will have to wait until next week’s report (delayed until Monday, November 14) to see the scope of the short covering that happened through Tuesday, November 8.

In contrast to ICE cotton, CBOT corn futures and KC wheat futures had a gradual downtrend across the week, while  CBOT soybean futures had a flat/sideways pattern. The U.S. dollar index traded flat/lower this week before plunging on Thursday.

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.