Since silver has bounced back from the low $14 range, I welcome the break. When you look at a five year chart, platinum has fallen more than silver over that period (and this was with a starting point before the big silver run up). Is it time to steer the bullion budget into platinum? I pulled a 5 year chart of the bullion ETFs vs one another. Not a perfect measure, but relatively close. Gold -6% Silver -10% Platinum -27%
I have found platinum to have a far bigger spot to buy spread at bullion dealers than gold or silver, possibly because of low volumes. It may prove a good investment in the long term due to demand as a catalyst but small items like jewellery and rings could be rather illiquid.
I find the same. High premiums on bullion, low recovery rate on melt of scrap, and thus, low payouts. It's a neat metal, but for these reasons I don't go to any great lengths to acquire it.
That is a concern I have. It's rare that I see platinum in a LCS. I've come to terms with the idea of having to ship it back to one of the big online dealers If I'm going to get tighter spreads. That being said, I'm also not on a short term horizon either. In a perfect world, over the course of my life, I could trade my metals in for one another when their price trends diverge from one another every "x" number of years. With gold and platinum at a cross right now, it would take roughly a $100-120 widening to break even on a gold for platinum swap if mailed in. So you can see that it's not going to be simple, and therefore not very frequent. If I could pull off a maneuver like that once every 5 years I'd be pretty excited, taking the profit balance in ounces of silver.
