Cotton futures were called to open around unchanged this morning, with little in the way of overnight cash business or even outside market influence were price impacting.
Prices soon settled into an excruciatingly tight trading range for the day, a similar range to the previous days this week.
Activity was anemic, with even the options pits and spread trading areas very quiet. It was fitting really that today was December's last trading day, going off in a whimper unchanged at 49.00 cents.
December has been one of the least volatile contracts in the environment of December deliveries, a victim of a supply hangover from the end of step 2 as well as the all encompassing CCC loan program.
All contracts finished in the red, but given the substantial losses in CBOT grains and in the CRB index, the losses were trivial, between 5 and 39 points on the active months. Estimated volume today was very light at 5,774 lots.
Market chatter was that physical markets are currently very quiet (nay dead!) and this is certainly not helping kick start the market.
In the meantime traders will look forward to both the export report tomorrow morning as well as the USDA supply and demand report on Monday for near term guidance.
Tomorrow's US export report should have some decent sales figures, though nothing as impressive as last weeks 501,000 bale effort. For the record we are expecting a sales figure close to 225,000 bales and shipments near 200,000 bales.
marketing@alchempro.com
