Reading course

If you buy fibre, yarn or fabric

21 numbered stops across 5 stages. Everything on this site that is yours, in the order it makes sense to meet it. You can stop after stage three and still be able to hold your own in a negotiation; stages four and five are what let you check the mill, and check us.

How long About an hour end to end. Stage 3 on its own is fifteen minutes and is the part you will come back to weekly.

1. Stage 1. Learn the words

   Half of what goes wrong in a yarn negotiation is two people using one word for two things. Twenty minutes here saves that.

   1. 1 The units everyone quotes in Reference Cents per pound, dollars per kilogram, rupees per maund. The same cotton in four currencies and three weights, and the exact factors between them.
   2. 2 Yarn count (thickness) systems Reference What Ne, Nm, tex and denier each measure, and which way round bigger means finer. Get this wrong and every price comparison you make is wrong.
   3. 3 Reading a fabric specification Reference 40s x 40s / 133 x 72 explained term by term, so a mill cannot describe a cheaper cloth in language you did not question.
   4. 4 Natural and man-made fibre properties Reference Typical published ranges. This is what tells you why the finer counts start needing extra long staple, and why that price step is not negotiable.

2. Stage 2. Read the guide for what you are buying

   Each guide names what actually sets the price, the modules to read and in what order, and the decision each supports. Read the one you buy; skim the one above it in the chain.

   1. 5 Buying fibre Guide The top of the chain. Even a fabric buyer should read this one, because everything below it is priced off it.
   2. 6 Buying yarn Guide Fibre plus a conversion cost, and how to tell which of the two actually moved when a mill says the market did.
   3. 7 Buying fabric Guide No honest fabric index exists anywhere, so this builds the price from yarn, conversion, wet processing and freight, and lists the nine things that move it.

3. Stage 3. Read the numbers, in this order

   This is the weekly loop. Five stops on the raw materials page, and each one changes what the next one means.

   1. 8 1. What the fibre costs The numbers The New York nearby, the US cash market, the world average and Indian Shankar-6, in one unit. Everything downstream is priced off these.
   2. 9 2. What the alternative costs The numbers The polyester chain from crude through PTA to fibre. Read it even if you buy cotton: it tells you whether a blend change would actually save anything.
   3. 10 3. Whether supply is at risk The numbers The world balance sheet, crop stress and how crowded the speculative position is. This says whether today’s price is likely to hold.
   4. 11 4. Only then, the yarn number The numbers Export values by origin and producer prices by spinning route. Read fourth on purpose: a yarn price means nothing until you know what the fibre under it did.
   5. 12 5. Shipping and country costs The numbers Container rates as cents per kilo, and the country costs behind each origin. On a low value cargo the sea leg can move more in a month than the fibre does.

4. Stage 4. Do the arithmetic on your own numbers

   Reading the market tells you what is happening. These turn it into your cost sheet.

   1. 13 Yarn count converter Calculator A spreadsheet with live formulas. Type your count and its system, read it in every other system, and check a ply notation before it costs you twofold on fabric weight.
   2. 14 Fabric weight calculator Calculator Construction in, GSM and yarn consumption out. Use it to sanity check a quotation: if the construction and the weight cannot be reconciled, one of the two is wrong.
   3. 15 Freight reckoner Calculator Put the box rate you were actually quoted, and the kilos you actually load, and read what freight adds per kilogram.
   4. 16 Every dataset as a file Calculator Every dataset as an Excel workbook, each with a plain English explanation sheet beside the data and its own sources and licence inside the file, so your own analysis can be checked by whoever you hand it to.

5. Stage 5. Go to the primary sources yourself

   The point of the whole site is that you should not have to take our word for anything. These are the sites our fibre and yarn numbers are read from. All of them are free.

   1. 17 USDA cotton market news (opens in a new tab) Outside site The weekly US spot price and adjusted world price. This is where our cotton card gets its number, published by the US government and free to anyone.
   2. 18 USDA WASDE (opens in a new tab) Outside site The monthly world supply and demand estimate. The balance sheet on our page is this report, rearranged and nothing more.
   3. 19 CFTC Commitments of Traders (opens in a new tab) Outside site Who is holding what in cotton futures, every Friday. Read it yourself when a broker tells you the market is crowded.
   4. 20 US BLS producer price indexes (opens in a new tab) Outside site The yarn and fibre index series behind our spinning route comparison. Free, monthly, and the base periods differ between series, which is the trap the learning page warns about.
   5. 21 Cotton Association of India (opens in a new tab) Outside site Indian spot rates at the source. Worth checking directly whenever an Indian quotation looks out of line with the world price.

That is the whole path. Nothing on it is a forecast and nothing is a quotation: it is published figures, the date each was read, and our own arithmetic where it is labelled as ours. If a step is unclear or a link is dead, tell us and we will fix it rather than leave you to work around it.