Palladium Price At A Premium To Platinum For The First Time In A Long Time

October 19, 2017

London (Oct 19)  The price of several metals has traditionally been looked at paired with that of another metal. For example, gold and silver prices are looked at in isolation and relative to each other, in part because both metals make up a major part of the jewelry trade.

So, too, are zinc and lead prices, where the correlation is not from market applications but from the fact lead and zinc are often co-mined from the same resource.

Like precious metals gold and silver, less prominent platinum and palladium can be both mined and used in very similar applications. The Platinum Group Metals, or PGMs, are often magmatic in origin and rare in economic concentrations. The majority of the world’s platinum and palladium comes from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Russia, where early low-cost surface mines have long since given way to deep, expensive and complex operations.

As the name suggests, platinum has long been the investor’s favorite PGM and enjoys the widest number of applications.

Recently, however, its quiet PGM peer palladium has caught investors’ interest.

Palladium has traded at a discount to platinum because of platinum’s greater cost of extraction and its wider scope of applications. But one application in which palladium does excel is catalytic converters for petrol engines. The diesel engine’s relative loss of favor over the last 12 to 18 months to the petrol engine has boosted demand for palladium, driving up the price to the point that it exceeded that of platinum this month for the first time in 16 years.

On Monday, palladium exceeded $1,000 per ounce on the London market compared to platinum’s $950 per ounce.

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