Commodities: Natural gas, gold slip despite US dollar weakness

Commodities put on a mixed performance on Friday despite weakness in the Greenback, amid a sharp drop in natural gas futures and a dip in gold which traders attributed to a pick-up in risk appetite.

At the closing bell on Friday, the Bloomberg commodity index was 0.05% lower to 86.99 even as the spot US dollar index retreated 0.47% to 92.78 - a two-month low.

Front month Brent crude oil futures were up by 0.49% at $63.86 a barrel on the ICE, alongside a jump of 1.60% to $58.95 a barrel for West Texas Intermediate.

Friday's jump in oil futures came despite an increase in the weekly US oil rig count from Baker Hughes of nine to 747, amid a report from Bloomberg that the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Russian Federation had reached an agreement to extend their oil output curbs until the end of 2018.

December 2017 NYMEX natural gas futures on the other hand dropped 5.22% to $2.81/MMBtu.

Industrial metals did find a bid in the wake of US dollar weakness, with all the main LME-traded contracts moving higher, bar zinc.

Precious metal gold on the other hand fell back, with the February 2018 COMEX contract down 0.39% at $1,291.80/oz..

Three-month LME copper advanced to $7,002 a metric tonne, up from $6,962 a tonne.

"Today was another holiday thin trading day but LME base metals continued to hold steady through the morning and made further gains in the afternoon sessions as the USD weakened through 1.1900 vs Euro.

"Reports that OPEC and Russia have a tentative agreement to extend production cuts to the end of 2018 took crude oil (Wti) towards $59/barrel. This, together with hopes of a "Black Friday" retail bonanza helped lift US equity indices. As investor risk sentiment improved, gold prices lost some momentum, edging back to 1285 area," said analysts at Sucden Financial.

Over among soft commodities, March 2018 CBoT corn was down 0.56% to $3.55 a bushel, alongside a 1.36% drop to $4.3475 a bushel for similarly-dated CBoT wheat.

ICE-traded March 2018 cocoa was also lower, retreating 0.80% to $2,107 a metric tonne.

Cotton#2 was the outlier, gaining 1.11% to $7.19 a pound.