Four metals, third session: gold $4,157.80, silver up 3.27%

§1Every metal on the board, a third day running.

Every precious metal on the Kitco board rose for a third consecutive session on Wednesday. At 5:58am New York time gold was bid at $4,157.80 an ounce, up $81.20 or 1.99%; silver at $61.35, up $1.94 or 3.27%; platinum at $1,747.00, up $19.00 or 1.10%; and palladium at $1,355.00, up $26.00 or 1.96%. Set against the print this paper carried in yesterday's tape, gold at $4,048.80 and down 0.14%, the metal has added about $109 an ounce in twenty-four hours. That is the largest single-session move in gold since this desk began carrying a daily 5:58am mark.

The reason is a shipping lane rather than a mine. Reuters and the currency desks report the United States, Iran and Oman closing on an interim agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with an announcement targeted for Wednesday, and oil has fallen on the expectation. Lower oil lowers the inflation path, a lower inflation path lowers the odds of another Federal Reserve increase, and traders have trimmed the probability of a September hike to about 57% from about 67% a day earlier. Gold rose because the war premium is coming out, not because it is going in. This desk filed the same inversion on 19 July, when gold lost 3.4% in a week of airstrikes.

§2The gram, not the ounce.

Silver did the heavy lifting, as it has all week. A 3.27% session against gold's 1.99% pulls the gold to silver ratio to 67.8 from about 69.0 at yesterday's mark, a second consecutive tightening. Platinum now stands at 42.0% of the gold price. For the bench, the number that matters is not the ounce but the gram: fine gold at $4,157.80 an ounce is $133.68 a gram, against $130.17 yesterday, which is $3.51 a gram added to the metal cost of every piece in a case overnight.

§3Two cautions for the record.

Two cautions belong on the record. The intraday spread was wide, with this paper's own overnight print at $4,170.90 at 3:08am and an independent check at $4,174.70 at 2:44am, both above the 5:58am bid carried here, so a reader working from a headline number rather than a timestamp is working from the wrong number. And the second sources disagree: Trading Economics printed platinum at $1,760.10 and palladium at $1,372.00 against Kitco's $1,747.00 and $1,355.00, spreads of $13.10 and $17.00. Kitco is this paper's designated mark and is what the tape carries. On the diamond lines, NAT1 and LGD1 are both carried unchanged, the lab-grown reference because two trackers stood 28% apart today at $709 and $552 and neither can be printed as a market.