March 10, 2006	Friday	Safar 9, 1427

KARACHI, March 9: Cotton market on Thursday showed an easy trend as spinners and mills again kept to the sidelines for no apparent bearish reasons and did not opt for fresh buying.

“The market appears to be the victim of slack mill demand rather than any other negative factor,” ginners said, adding “the chief motive behind their conspicuous absence is to push prices further lower”.

There was no panic among the leading ginners who were still holding an unsold stock of 1.5m bales, worth Rs18 billion. “If the stalemate continues for another couple of weeks some among them may opt for hasty selling”, they said.

The hide-and-seek game being played by the spinners had already weakened the holding capacity of weaker links among ginners and that may cause fresh dents in the selling prices, some others said.

“Spinners enter the market one day with big buying orders and then stay away for couple of sessions, keeping ginners at their toes all the time, with physical business falling to a low ebb”, says a leading ginner commenting on no-win situation.

Floor brokers said that spinner and mills were keeping to the sidelines awaiting the outcome of the TCP tender for 50,000 bales to be opened on March 16, which could set the future market trend.

They said that over 20 per cent increase in textile exports during the first half of the current fiscal should have attracted active mill buying to cover their forward positions but leading among them are indulging in technical manoeuvring to outwit ginners.

It was perhaps in this background that official spot rates were further lowered by Rs25 per maund but no buyers at the dip.

New York cotton futures showed fresh decline of 0.70 for the matured March contract at 53.10, while the ruling May settlement managed to recover by 0.11 cents at 53.86 cents per lb.

Ready off-take was low as there were no matching buying offers at the falling prices from the spinners and mills.