May 2026 - Week 3 Edition
Platinum is Gaining Strength – With More Gains Likely to Come
In the last year (2025-26), Silver has clearly been the “Gold Medal winner” in the Precious Metals trio, but platinum has made a huge up move as well, rising much faster than gold in a spurt from $884 in April 2025 to a quick spike above $2,850 in January of 2026. This move was all the more amazing since platinum trailed gold and silver for a very long time. At the end of 2015, for instance, platinum and gold both traded barely above $1,000, but since then gold has soared above $5,000 at one point, while platinum hovered around $1,000 (in a narrow trading range between $800 and $1,200) for nearly a full decade before staging its dramatic rally in 2025 and into early 2026, mirroring the rapid rise of silver.
During 2025, platinum rose from a low of $884 during the market’s “tariff tantrum” on April 7, 2025, soaring to $2,852 on January 26, 2026, more than tripling in under 10 months. Both silver and platinum had room to rise – just by “catching up” to gold’s rapid gains, but there’s also an industrial component, since platinum – like silver – tends to rise or fall more on global industrial demand than on fundamental factors underpinning gold’s rise, including inflation, global crises and gold’s reserve currency status.
Even though platinum recently traded around $2,000, well below its January peak, that price is still more than double its 2025 lows. Here are five major factors that support a continued rise in platinum:
- Platinum is far rarer than gold. Only one ounce of platinum is mined for every 20 ounces of gold mined each year, making platinum a “thinner” market, giving platinum more market leverage.
- Platinum’s use in the auto industry and other industrial processes are stable sources of demand.
- Platinum’s use in fuel cells and green hydrogen production are adding new demand sources.
- In addition to this industrial demand, platinum also enjoys increasing investment demand.
- The platinum market is in supply deficit – with demand outpacing supply – causing rising prices.
For decades, platinum has been used (along with other Platinum Group Metals, like palladium and rhodium) to neutralize exhaust emissions in vehicles. Other uses are in jewelry, glass making, fuel cells and now by creating green hydrogen. Paul Wilson, CEO of the World Platinum Investment Council, said:
“The role of green hydrogen is now more widely accepted as being part of the route to decarbonization, which has benefits for platinum, being used in both electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen and in hydrogen fuel cells. Investors are becoming increasingly aware of platinum’s key strategic role in unlocking hydrogen's crucial contribution to achieving global net zero targets.”
In 2025, 38% of platinum demand came from auto catalysts to reduce vehicle emissions and 27% was tied to other industrial applications, adding up to 65% of demand for industrial uses. Another 26% came from jewelry demand and the remaining 9% came from investment demand, including bars, coins and ETFs.
For 2026, the platinum market remains in a deficit condition, with annual demand outpacing supply by more than 300,000 ounces, driven mostly by strong industrial demand and limited new mining output. Industrial demand is the main growth engine, rising 9% in 2026 vs. 2025 and totaling over 2.2 million ounces, while bar and coin investment demand is growing even faster, up 27% to 719,000 ounces.
New platinum supplies are flat, and most platinum is mined in the sometimes-troubled nations of South Africa and Russia, so we could see the supply deficit rise further due to the prolonged war in Ukraine. Russia is the second-largest producer of platinum, and the West may boycott Russia’s main exports.
Rising investment demand promises a great deal of leverage to platinum prices. A prudent portfolio doesn’t need much platinum, but the noble metal has its place in every diversified portfolio.
Palladium: A Thinly Traded Precious Metal Where (Almost) Anything Can Happen
The narrowness of the palladium market is the main reason why its price doubled in less than three months in 2022 – and it doubled again from 2025 to early 2026, rising from $877 per ounce in April of 2025 to $2,170 in early 2026 before settling back down to the $1,400 range by May of 2026.
Since Russia produces about 40% of new global supply – tied with South Africa as the #1 supply source – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused the price of palladium to nearly double from $1,576 per ounce in December 2021 to $3,015 on March 7, 2022, two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. A similar surge happened a year earlier, from 2020’s Covid low to 2021’s peak, so palladium has a long history of fast doublings and equally fast “reversion to the norm” after a sharp correction.
As with platinum, palladium’s demand primarily comes from its role in reducing vehicle emissions, plus a wide array of applications in various industries. Here are just a few of palladium’s industrial applications:
- Catalytic Converters: Palladium supplies about 80% of global demand for this application.
- Hybrid Vehicles also use palladium in their catalytic converters, contributing to further demand.
- Multi-layer Ceramic Capacitors (MLCCs) for smartphones, computers, and other electronics.
- Dental Alloys for crowns and bridges.
- Hydrogen Purification and Storage, as a potential medium for hydrogen storage in fuel cells.
Platinum and Palladium Are Extremely Thin (Volatile) Precious Metals
Unlike gold and silver, platinum and palladium have more wildly volatile ups and downs, but if held for a long-term, a decade or more, they should match the gains of gold or silver.
Platinum and palladium are both narrowly traded, compared with gold and silver. Combined, the two Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) have a market capitalization of about $750 billion, about one-sixth the capitalization of silver, and only 2.4% the size of the gold market, dwarfing the Platinum Group Metals.
(Capitalization, or market value = price as of May 18, 2026, times the estimated amount of above-ground supply)
Palladium’s market is less than 1% the size of gold’s market, hence its proclivity to rise or fall so rapidly.
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Gold fell from $4,700 last week to under $4,500 this week before recovering about $70 per ounce on Wednesday, May 20th, to close at approximately $4,550. Gold’s decline is mostly a reaction (or an overreaction) to the temporarily high inflation numbers released a week ago. Gold traders may also be concerned about uncertainties over the war in Iran and relations with China following last week’s summit meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing.
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