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In the Marketplace
“How ya doin’?”
“Oh, fair to middlin’.”
It may surprise some that this familiar phrase is a technical term in the cotton trade. Defining important cotton fiber characteristics, setting standards for them, and accurately measuring those quality parameters have long been integral to the buying and selling of cotton. From vague descriptions to highly trained manual classers to sophisticated high-tech instruments, cotton classing has seen incredible advances. Similarly, cotton marketing has gone from selling locally out of wagons to transatlantic cable futures to online trading of bales with precisely the fiber qualities required by the buyer. Speedy electronic transmission of large amounts of data characterizes today’s cotton market.
