ICE Cotton Hits Daily Limit Up, Just Shy Of Record

1656 EDT [Dow Jones] Cotton futures rose to settle at the highest pricepossible per exchange rules on Monday. Cotton for December delivery settled 4cents, or 3.2%, higher at $1.2926 a pound on ICE Futures U.S. Futures arepoised to test the post-Reconstruction Era settlement high of $1.2959 a pound,hit on Oct 26. This time, ICE cotton took its cue from the Zhengzhou CommodityExchange in China, where cotton hit limit up earlier in the global trading day.Speculative investors there took faith in comments from the Ministry ofCommerce, which said that commodity prices were likely to stay high through thefourth quarter and early 2011.