KARACHI, March 20: Firm conditions were witnessed on the cotton market on Saturday as spinners and mills continued to cover their forward positions at the prevailing prices.

"We can't sit idle in a highly volatile world price outlook virtually guided by speculative tendencies about the supply and consumption position," spinners say. "Our forward sales are still insecure and we have to fill in the supply gaps irrespective of the ruling prices."

A big-lot business was witnessed as both the spinners and the mills were out to grab the floating stock irrespective of the asking prices. The ginners, however, are playing a hide-and-seek game with them.

One day offer to sell a large number of bales, but the very next day they withdrew to the sidelines apparently in an effort to keep prices within their parity levels, brokers said.

The interesting feature is that most of the ginners are trying to sell their low-mic lots to the starving mills and are holding on to fine ones, anticipating an increase in prices at the fag-end of the season.

The current season was terribly disturbing for the textile sector as the mid-season price flare-up caused by speculation about a short crop upset their export projections.

"But the sanity to price outlook did not return even at the fag-end of the season and we have to resume our covering operations against forward sales to honour export commitments," leading spinners claim.

What seems to have further complicated the price situation was highly erratic price movements being witnessed on the New York Cotton Exchange, which is currently in the tight grip of speculators, they added.

"Supply gap is still wide despite the fact that our investment on lint has almost doubled because of higher selling prices," they said.

Official spot rates, therefore, were firmly held at the previous levels, but most of the deals reported in the ready section were done according to quality premiums.

New York cotton futures on the other hand maintained firm trend and closed with fresh modest rise of 0.17 and 0.1 cents per lb for both the ruling May and the forward July contracts at 67.92 and 69.12 cents, respectively.

Ready business was active as till late in the evening about 10,000 bales changed hands, the following being some of the notable deals: 3,200 bales, upper Sindh low-mic at Rs2,650 and 5,000 bales, at Rs2,900 to Rs2,950 and 400 bales, Dharki at Rs3,050.