For the week ending Friday, October 11, the nearby Dec’24 ICE cotton futures contract gyrated sideways between 71 and 74 cents before narrowing into a tighter range around 72.50 cents per pound (see chart above courtesy of Barchart.com). The Dec’24 settled Friday at 72.21 cents per pound, down 45 points on the day. The more distant Dec’25 contract settled Friday at 73.42 cents per pound. Chinese cotton prices eroded this week, with the A-Index of world price also trending lower.
In other markets, CBOT corn and soybeans followed modest downtrends across the week. KC wheat futures trended higher before peaking, sliding, and then collapsing Friday. U.S. dollar index traded flat, then trended higher, and finally leveled off to close the week. Other macro influences (i.e., GDP, inflation, and interest rate policy) remained mixed, e.g., unexpectedly low U.S. consumer sentiment, reflecting a “bad news is bad” reaction in currency markets.
Cotton-specific influences this week included neutral supply and demand adjustments from USDA, as well as continued weak U.S. export sales. The pace of 2024/25 export shipments remained below the needed weekly average pace to reach USDA’s target level of exports, though this is not unusual for this supply-dominated time of the year. In terms of weather, this week saw more unhelpful rains along the U.S. Gulf Coast and Florida peninsula, in part from Hurricane Milton. Fortunately the main Cotton Belt regions appeared to dodge these effects.
Daily levels of ICE cotton open interest increased, decreased, and finally stabilized for the week ending October 10. Speculative positioning this week was mixed. As of Tuesday, October 8 (released Friday, October 11) the weekly snapshot of speculative positioning showed 830 fewer (liquidated) hedge fund longs, reinforced by by 3,113 new hedge fund shorts, week over week. The weekly adjustment to index fund net long position got 5,056 more positive.
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.