Commodities: Platinum, silver futures jump on weaker US dollar

Precious metals stole the show as a much weaker-than-expected reading on the US services sector left traders in the US dollar licking their wounds.

A weak reading on the US ISM´s service sector purchasing manager´s index for the month of August saw the US dollar spot index drop like a stone, to trade down by 1.01% at 94.872 as of 1855 BST.

In parallel, Bloomberg´s commodity index was up by 0.39% to 83.31.

Worth noting in that regard, Morgan Stanley cautioned clients that the risk of the European Central Bank and Bank of Japan surprising negatively was greater than that of the Federal Reserve doing so.

"We are below-consensus on US and EU growth, and believe China slows in 2H," the bank´s strategists said in a research note dated 5 September.

Morgan Stanley also expected crude oil and iron futures to trade lower.

Against that backdrop, December 2016 silver futures on COMEX jumped 4.23% to $20.19 an ounce with spot platinum racing up 2.94% alongside it to $1,102.70 per ounce.

Gold futures also ended the session notably higher.

Over in the energy space it was a mixed picture, with October 2016 NYMEX natural gas erasing 2.69% to change hands at $2.72/MMBtu as November-dated Brent futures dropped 0.94% to $47.18 a barrel on the same exchange.

Earlier in the day, albeit amid slightly contradictory reports, a top Iranian official appeared to leave the door open to negotiations to freeze oil output towards theend of 2016, once the country´s output had regained its pre-sanctions levels.

It was difficult to distiguish a trend in agricultural futures as well, with the benchmark corn and wheat contracts sporting modest losses on the CBoT, but cotton #2 ICE-traded futures higher by 1.78% to $69.00 a pound.