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ICE cotton futures gained 1 percent on Friday to recover partially from the previous session's decline, on speculative buying and short-covering, but they were down for the week. The July cotton contract on ICE Futures US settled up 1.17 percent at 78.87 cents per lb, after falling nearly 2 percent in the previous session. The contract was down about 0.6 percent for the week after two consecutive weekly gains.

"Today is the end of the month so you're seeing some short- covering and I think people are still buying it for the trend," said Keith Brown, principal at cotton broker Keith Brown and Co in Moultrie, Georgia. "We had a very sloppy export number yesterday which broke the market but the trend of the market is still up and so I think the speculators still continue to buy the breaks."

Weekly export sales data from the US Department of Agriculture on Thursday showed sales totalled 115,500 running bales for the previous week, the lowest since late September. Speculators raised their net long position in cotton for the second straight week in the week to April 25, by 10,429 contracts to 95,359, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday.

The July cotton contract on ICE Futures US settled up 0.91 cent, or 1.17 percent, at 78.87 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 77.65 and 78.97 cents a lb. Total futures market volume rose by 2,877 to 24,094 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 440 to 253,351 contracts in the previous session.

Copyright Reuters, 2017


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