Monday 21 January 2013

Platinum group metals, a story of scarcity and industrial needs

Among precious metals, platinum deserves special attention because of several of its characteristics. Unlike gold or silver, platinum is an extremely hard metal, with high wear resistance. Alloying platinum with gold makes the alloy more malleable.  Platinum is denser than gold and has with 21.45 g/cm³ over twice the density of silver. It melts at a higher temperature (1768.3 °C or 2041.4 K) than silver or gold.  Unlike silver and palladium[1] and similar to gold, platinum is not corroded in any normal environment.
(With graphs updated as of Jan 5, 2017)

Sunday 13 January 2013

Miners relative to precious metal prices - an update

The focus of this blog article is on the gold and silver miners from a tactical point of view: how do PM miners perform relative to the price of gold or silver.
Special attention is paid to the miners covered by the database 'Canadian gold and silver mining', for which a capital weighted index of gold- and silver miners is calculated. Aggregated performance is one thing, it's also very illustrative that miner and explorer performance has been diverging from outperforming the metals by a wide margin to losing ground completely.