Just curious, has anyone noticed that the last week Gold and Silver keep going up and up, while Platinum and Palladium have been going down. Any reason's to this??
platinum and palladium are industrial metals platinum is used mostly in cars (catalytic converters) so if the economy's around the world tank and growth slows, the demand for industrial metals fall Gold is a pure store of wealth ... it's really become like a surrogate currency ... hard money that can't be inflated like paper money can ... many central banks and governements own gold (and buy gold) to help diversify themselves away from paper currency like the US Dollar Silver is sort of a 50/50 metal ... it's also a bit of a surrogate currency ... many countries produced gold AND SILVER coins in their history ... So people are used to using silver as store of wealth ... however big central banks and governments generally dont buy or hold large stores of silver ... however I think the public does ... since silver is so much cheaper and easier to buy (afford) for the common man ... Silver also has industrial uses. So silver sort of provides a dual play ... two ways to make money on it.
Winged hit it on the head. I would add that silver's dual nature makes it very hard to predict. Industrial metals you can predict based upon industrial demand, (btw Platinum has many, many more uses than converters, it is a very important chemical catalyst for chemical plants), and gold is more a store of wealth. Silver, being dual, its always hard to decide if bad economic news will increase or decrease its price. Many like to think bad news will increase its price for investment, and good news will increase its price for industrial usage. It cannot be both of course, but you will see some people making both arguments. There are a lot of intersecting, mutually exclusive things going on with silver, not even including investor psychology or hysteria, so this always clouds the outlook significantly. Three years ago silver was primarily an investor metal, but almost all of its rise recently has been investor demand.
I agree!!! buy & demand is the key. but experts claim if you took all the Platinum found world wide and made 1 square cube it would be about 100ft squared. how true is that fact I am not 100% sure but that what I have seen quoted in my reading about platinum.:kewl:
You point is very sound Jello, but psychology is the overriding important factor. There are many, many metals MUCH rarer than gold, but eons ago humans fell in love with gold as a metal, maybe because it was the rarest metal they could obtain. Simple rarity will not guarantee a rise in pricing, if so things like Rhodium and other rare earths would be in Fort Knox, not gold.
