Metals Minute 37: Whipsaw Week

It has been a whipsaw week in the financial markets, providing some great opportunities for the metals. For the past week, we saw gold down 1% to $1,810, silver down 5% to $25.22, platinum down 5% to $1,084, and palladium down 7% to $2,692.

For the 1-yr period, we have gold down 2%, silver up 18%, platinum up 23%, and palladium up 25%. With equity markets extremely over-purchased, it creates a volatile situation, as we have seen the last two days. To take some pressure off of a cratering stock market, paper contracts for metals were sold heavily. But most of the pain in the precious metals sector was felt by those owning paper positions in ETFs.

As a reminder, there continues to be an outsized spread between “spot” and the cost for American Gold or Silver Eagle coins (physical metal). There has been a minor change in physical metals prices compared to the changes in the spot price.

New concerns about the Delta-variant of Covid over the last week have also sparked a temporary strengthening in the Dollar, which has temporarily decreased precious metals prices, providing an excellent opportunity to purchase more in what is historically a strong season metal.