Copper prices rose 1 percent Monday, with London flirting with the four-month high struck in the previous session after stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs data last week.

 Three-month LME copper CMCU3 rose $64 to $7,704 a tonne by 0347 GMT. On Friday, copper hit a session peak of $7,750, its highest since late April in response to better-than-expected U.S. payrolls data.

 "Business confidence is the biggest uncertainty that the economy is struggling with. U.S. data has been rather mixed recently, but the payrolls data has soothed fears of a double dip," Barclays Capital analyst Yingxi Yu said.

 U.S. non-farm payrolls fell 54,000 in August, much less severe than the 100,000 job losses analysts had forecast.

Losses in June and July were also revised down. Yingxi added: "Within metals, we are seeing increasing divergence. Copper and tin... are performing better than their peers. With fewer macro fears as we emerge from the early recovery phase, we will see fundamentals playing a more important role."

 Inventory trends also remain supportive. Copper inventories in warehouses monitored by the Shanghai Futures Exchange fell 4 percent from a week earlier.

 LME stocks fell 1,800 tonnes on Friday to 397,675 to their lowest since November last year when prices were around $1,200 lower than current values. When copper hit its record high of $8,940 in July 2008, stocks stood at around 120,000 tonnes.

 "Copper is now less than 15 percent off the record and there people out there drooling to see prices break it," a trader in Hong Kong said.

 Next month the great and the good in the metals world gather in London for the annual LME Dinner, when miners, smelters and consumers get together to thrash out supply deals for the following year in what is termed the "mating season".

 "In the very near term, that might be difficult, but towards the end of this month and the start of the mating season in October, sparks could fly," the trader added.

 The week of the event is frequently a nexus of volatility as prevailing sentiment crystalises on one side of the market or the other to send prices soaring or sliding.

 The mood in 2008 was especially depressed, triggering a string of falls that saw copper slide $2,000 in two months from $8,200 in mid-October. The mood last year was more positive with a rally from below $6,000 in October that peaked at around $7,800 in early January.

 Tin CMSN3 rose 1.2 percent to $21,450. Worries about supply from top exporter, Indonesia and declining inventories have pushed ton prices up 27 percent this year, making it the top performer in the LME complex. Like copper, tin is around 15 percent off its all-time high struck in May 2008.

 In other metals, LME zinc CMZN3 rallied 1.6 percent, while Shanghai metal SZNc3 gained 2 percent. LME zinc has risen 11 percent in the past seven sessions, its strongest performance since mid-June.

 Traders noted buyers had returned to the futures market in a big way in the past two weeks as producers and merchants held back physical sales in China on hopes of higher prices, given the threat of supply disruption from maintenance outages.