Palladium now worth more than Platinum!

[Country]

I never thought this would happen. Platinum ($918) has really lost its luster against Palladium ($924) and GOLD ($1282). How low could Platinum go?

[Recyclersteve]

Wow! I'm with you- I always thought palladium would be at best 10-15% cheaper than platinum. It just goes to show how often the crowd is wrong.

[highroller4321]

Rumor is that the US mints order for the new palladium eagles took a chunk out of the market.

[chris6084]

This is my fault. I had to liquidate a portion of my stack to fund some expenses. I opted to sell my Palladium and keep my Platinum. No surprise this happened.

[Recyclersteve]

Now I know I am totally fantasizing here, but what if the price of copper soared while gold remained about the same price it is now, and copper was worth as much as gold. Gold, to keep it fairly simple, is worth about $1.5 million per 100#.

Goodness, I'd be fairly rich if that happened.

Can you imagine all the stories you'd read about on this site (I sold all my copper for near face value back in the day- woulda, coulda, shoulda)? People trading Morgan dollars (slabbed CC's) even up for common date copper pennies. It would be absolutely wild.

I would get out my phone to finally record my wife say "Ok, I was wrong this time." To which I'd say "A little louder, please."

You don't have to be asleep to dream!

[68Camaro]

Rumor is that the US mints order for the new palladium eagles took a chunk out of the market.

If so, illustrates how thin that market is, for that to move the price that much. Pd was in the low 800s just a couple months ago.

[highroller4321]

Rumor is that the US mints order for the new palladium eagles took a chunk out of the market.

If so, illustrates how thin that market is, for that to move the price that much. Pd was in the low 800s just a couple months ago.

http://www.monex.com/cpm/2017CPMpgm.pdf

In 2016 there was around 9.3M ounces of palladium mined per year, with 38% of that being mined in Russia and 25% from South Africa. Last year there was around 9.4M ounces of palladium consumed, with around 66% of that from the auto industry. That left around 100k ounces "short" in 2016. The LME warehouse had enough to cover the shortage in 2016.

In 2017 it was predicted that there was going to be a small surplus from production, around 73k ounces. When the prediction was made no one knew how many PAE were going to be made. If the mint decides to make 50k that would be enough to wipe out the surplus, with a margin of error. There also are no hard numbers yet but it seems the auto industry is using up more palladium then originally estimated.





So I guess the U.S mint order is small enough to not majorly effort the price, but in a "small" market every additional ounce counts.

[68Camaro]

Nice analysis - thanks for looking up the data!

Not to mention that the LME warehouse was apparently depleted; are they not going to restock?

[Recyclersteve]

Also, for us historians, don't forget that palladium rose sharply near the beginning of the new millennium. In the late 1990's palladium was about $200/oz. It rose to $1,100 by January, 2001. This gigantic spike was largely attributed to Ford Motor Co. fearing a worldwide shortage and stockpiling a bunch of palladium. After the metal came back down in price from the momentary spike, Ford said they lost almost a billion dollars by buying so high.

[JadeDragon]

I should have bought more than an ounce. I think I'll keep that ounce even at these prices.