Cotton is the only major ag contract whose demand curve is set by a petrochemical. Supply lives or dies on High Plains rainfall; demand competes with polyester, which is priced off crude. One market, two entirely different sets of fundamentals — and a positioning book that regularly bets on only one of them.
Explore the Demo → Current cotton signal →Every other row crop we cover is eaten. Cotton is worn — and that changes everything about how it trades. On the supply side it behaves like a classic weather market: dryland acres on the Texas High Plains produce, or fail to produce, on the strength of a few spring rains, and abandonment can erase a meaningful share of planted area before a single boll opens. The question every summer is not how much was planted, but how much will be harvested.
On the demand side, cotton competes with polyester for share of the world's fiber consumption — and polyester is priced off crude oil. When crude falls, synthetic fiber gets cheaper and mills blend away from cotton; when crude rallies, cotton gains competitiveness without a single bale changing hands. How much of a cotton rally is cotton, and how much is oil?
Then there is the market's own peculiar mechanism: on-call sales. Mills that buy cotton "on call" leave the futures price unfixed — and the running CFTC tally of those unfixed positions is effectively a ledger of forced future buying or selling. When unfixed mill commitments pile up against a rising market, who blinks first? The COT report says who is positioned; the on-call report hints at who is obligated.
Every SoftSignal market is covered the same way: who holds the positions, what the balance sheet says, what conditions on the ground are doing, and what the demand backdrop implies. For cotton, each layer looks like this.
Cotton's supply question is decided early: spring moisture on the High Plains sets the abandonment stakes before summer even starts. By harvest, the argument has usually moved from the field to the balance sheet.
Approximate windows for the US belt as a whole; West Texas dryland timing differs from the Delta and Southeast, which is why the report reads drought coverage by region rather than as a single national number.
On the monthly clock: the WASDE cotton balance sheet lands around the 10th–12th with a same-day visual supplement. March Prospective Plantings and June Acreage reset the acreage math twice a year.
The core read: COT percentiles, on-call sales, world stocks-to-use, cotton-belt drought coverage, crop progress, and the crude-oil demand proxy in one weekly document.
See it in the demo →Cotton's world and US balance sheet visualized the day of each monthly WASDE release — ending stocks, stocks-to-use back to 2007, and revision tracking.
See it in the demo →Cotton No. 2 positioning in cross-market context — read against sugar, coffee, and cocoa to see whether a move is cotton-specific or a softs-wide flow.
See it in the demo →The public one-page read: managed-money regime, week-over-week change, and drought stress — updated after every CFTC release, with an RSS feed.
Current cotton signal →The full report — positioning percentiles, on-call sales, drought coverage, and the WASDE cotton supplement — is in the open demo. No email, no card.