Cotton Down Nearly Three Percent As Hurricane Threat To Crops Fade:
Cotton futures slid nearly 3 percent on Wednesday, their biggest intra-day percentage drop in over three weeks, as the threat of crop damage in the south-eastern United States from Hurricane Matthew diminished. The second month December contract on ICE Futures touched the key 70 cent level for the first time in over a week earlier in the session. “When precipitation levels in the eastern parts of North and South Carolina dropped to half of what they were yesterday, we saw prices go down sharply. … A lot of people have their eyes on the hurricane,” Societe Generale analyst Gabriel Crivorot said.
Damage to cotton crops in North Carolina from Hurricane Matthew is not going to be as severe as initially thought, according to Louis Rose, an independent cotton trader and consultant with Risk Analytics in Memphis, Tennessee. Matthew, a major Category Three hurricane, was bearing down on the Bahamas and aiming toward Florida with maximum sustained winds around 120 mph (195 kph) as of 2 pm EDT (1800 GMT), the US National Hurricane Center said, adding that it was too soon to predict where Matthew was likely to do the most damage along the US coastline.
The December cotton contract on ICE Futures US settled down 2.66 percent, the biggest weekly intra-day decline since September 12, or 1.85 cents, at 67.82 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 67.53 and 70 cents a lb, a peak since September 27. Total futures market volume rose by 4,815 to 23,127 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 1,138 to 248,637 contracts in the previous session. Traders awaited the weekly export data from the United States government on Thursday.
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