Well, sort of. Silver's tightness (and current world events) are trying to push silver upward, but the heavy hand of JPM has both gold and silver on a VERY short leash right now - especially at the USD$36 mark for silver. So silver is not strongly driving this divergence at the moment Rather, the palladium weakness is due to the fact that Palladium is not 'widely' recognized as a store of value (like Au and Ag) because it is predominantly an industrial metal (Platinum is similar, but it is used in jewelry too. I've only ever seen people wear palladium ingots on chains - barely jewelry! - but there might be other decorative uses that I'm not aware of) The current events in Japan have been depressing the industrial sector (DOW Jones index etc) over the past 8 days. Towards the end of last year Palladium gave even silver a run for its money. For now the tables are turning.
Oh, I forgot to include the graph. You can see a significant divergence has occured since mid-Feb. Source: http://paperempire.net/2011/03/14/physical-silver-breakout/ Yes, that's an interesting observation about the different roles of Silver and Palladium, Turk. Silver as a store of value and a form of money throughout history, Palladium is not. . . fair enough. I've never considered Palladium as an investment/form of saving personally, whereas Gold and Silver are natural choices. However, the point the article makes is that there is a physical squeeze in Silver that does not exist in Palladium.
Yes, that chart is pretty compelling! It might be helpful though to simply ask "Why is Palladium slipping?" I think the following article sheds some light on this: (I won't post a link - you need to be registered - it's FT.com) On another level we don't need to look any further than the silver chart alone to see that a squeeze is building. Here is the current Palladium action. (And we thought Silver was having a correction! )
is it just me, or does that chart suggest palladium is heading for another drop? looks like its gone off over the edge again....
