"One of the things that helped prices today was reports of weather related damage in Texas over the past two weeks, especially dry weather. It has caused more damage than what people had expected," said Gabriel Crivorot, analyst at Societe Generale in New York.
"This caused speculators to get back to the market and saw some buying." Speculators reduced a bullish stance in cotton for the eighth straight week, US Commodity Futures Trading Commission data showed on Friday. They reduced a bullish stance in cotton by 4,592 lots to 20,821 lots in the week to July 11, the data showed. That marked the smallest net long stance in the fibre in over a year.
Total futures market volume rose by 1,240 to 15,977 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 1,547 to 216,306 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of July 14 totalled 62,690 480-lb bales, down from 66,825 in the previous session.