US copper closed up one percent on Friday as a weaker dollar made the metal more attractive to buyers and helped it recover from losses early in the session and on Thursday. The market fell 3 percent Thursday on liquidation of long positions and stop-loss sales as the dollar climbed to a one-month high against the euro.
The euro fought back Friday, rising 0.2 percent to stand at $1.3517 to the dollar by mid afternoon in New York. This - and the belief among some that Thursday's selling in copper may have been overdone - aided recovery in the metal on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, analysts said.
At the close, COMEX's most-active copper for July delivery ended up 3.75 cents, or 1.05 percent, at $3.6040 a lb, near the session peak of $3.6365. The contract had fallen as much as 1.1 percent earlier to $3.5265.
May copper ended up 3.70 cents at $3.6010. The rest of the complex rose between 2.15 and 3.65 cents. "Really, all in all, I view today as more of a technically motivated move, with the continuance from yesterday's sell-off coming into early this morning, and then a short covering bounce as the day wore on," said David Meger, an analyst for base metals at Chicago's Alaron Trading.
Dealers said Friday's rebound in COMEX copper also came despite a 4 percent drop in Asian prices of the metal, after a week-long holiday in China caused a pile up in copper stocks on the Shanghai Futures Exchange.
"But we also had a fall overnight in LME copper stocks, so that kind of balanced up what happened in Shanghai," said a dealer. Copper inventories on the London Metal Exchange fell 1,775 tonnes to 142,275 tonnes at Thursday's close.
LME copper for delivery in three months ended the official session at $7,895 a tonne, trimming earlier losses of 2 percent and almost unchanged from Thursday's $7,900. Final estimated open-outcry trading volumes on the COMEX for copper futures reached 10,207 lots. As of May 1, open interest in COMEX copper futures rose 1,235 lots to 82,176 contracts.