Nov 9 (Reuters) - ICE cotton futures fell on Thursday, after hitting a near two month high earlier in the session, on a bearish World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) report from the U.S. government.
Cotton contracts for March settled down 0.32 cent, or 0.46 percent, at 68.54 cents per lb. It traded within a range of 68.34 and 69.67 cents a lb, its highest level since Sept. 12.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), in its monthly WASDE report, raised U.S. production estimates to 21.38 million bales from 21.12 in the previous month.
It also raised world production estimates by 596,000 bales to 121.46 million bales and projections for U.S. ending stocks by 300,000 bales to 6.1 million bales.
However, the agency lowered its forecasts for world ending stocks by 1.5 million bales to 90.88 million bales.
"Even though the global numbers were a bit bullish, the U.S. ending stocks had a big influence on (prices)," said Gabriel Crivorot, analyst at Societe Generale in New York, adding that the report was overall "slightly bearish."
Earlier in the day, the USDA also reported net upland sales of 205,300 running bales (RB) for the 2017-18 marketing year and 31,200 RB for the 2018-19 marketing year in its weekly export sales report.
"I don't think (export sales data) affected prices negatively because before the WASDE report, prices were up a bit and they fell over 1 percent from the top only after it was released," Crivorot said.
Total futures market volume fell by 8,824 to 58,432 lots. Data showed total open interest gained 770 to 236,707 contracts in the previous session.
Certificated cotton stocks deliverable as of Nov. 8 totaled 41,922 480-lb bales, up from 39,322 in the previous session.
The dollar index was down 0.41 percent. The Thomson Reuters CoreCommodity CRB Index, which tracks 19 commodities, was down 0.01 percent. (Reporting by Nithin Prasad in Bengaluru; editing by Diane Craft)