Cotton falls on China factory data, WASDE 'hangover'

ICE cotton fell on Monday in response to a US government report late last week which raised the outlook for global inventories and after data from top consumer China showed lower-than-expected factory output growth. "China put out yet another bearish industrial production number," said Keith Brown, a Moultrie, Georgia-based cotton trader, adding that there was a "hangover" from Friday's report in which the US Department of Agriculture slashed its estimate for global demand by more than 1 million 480-lb bales.

Cotton contracts for December settled down 0.58 cent, a 1 percent loss, at 62.55 cents per pound after trading in a range of 62.43 and 63.70. China's factory output rose 6.1 percent in August from the same month a year earlier, missing market expectations.

Total futures market volume fell by 14,673 to 16,335 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 479 to 179,057 contracts in the previous session. Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of September 11 totalled 58,358 480-lb bales, down from 58,472 in the previous session. The dollar index was up 0.07 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.47 percent. Speculators cut their net long position in cotton to 27,748 contracts as of September 8, from 32,184 contracts the prior week. The Relative Strength Index in the most-active contract fell to 42.332.