With gold and silver rising (and taking a breather) recently, there was talk among my various channels on another overlooked precious metal: platinum.

Platinum is a silver-grey metal which is non-reactive and highly resistant to corrosion, like gold. Platinum has been used for centuries as jewellery, although not as extensive as gold.  Perhaps it is best known for its modern use, that as a catalyst in a catalytic converter in vehicles that still utilize internal combustion engines.

Platinum’s performance, at least in price, did not really conform with its precious metal siblings gold and silver. While gold and silver historically were somewhat positively correlated with each other, for platinum, that held true for a while until 2016 or so when it started to diverge (see Figure 1).

Fig.1: Platinum prices (blue) vs gold prices (orange) from 1985 to present. Grey columns denote recession periods. Source: Macrotrends.