Platinum adds 4.56% and takes the tape's biggest move from gold

§1Four marks, one board, two bases.

Kitco's live board at 05:59 New York time read gold at $4,581.60 an ounce, silver at $69.31, platinum at $1,881.00 and palladium at $1,336.00. All four are written back over the 04:58 marks the tape desk filed this morning, and all four are now this paper's marks of record, with the source named and the timestamp new. Against this paper's own marks of 20 August the moves are gold up $99.40 or 2.22%, silver up $2.72 or 4.08%, platinum up $82.00 or 4.56% and palladium up $28.00 or 2.14%. Measured instead on Kitco's own session, the four move the same way: gold up 1.40%, silver up 1.99%, platinum up 2.96%, palladium up 1.75%. Both bases point the same way this morning, which they did not yesterday.

The marks being retired are platinum's $1,799.00 and palladium's $1,308.00, both set by this desk at 06:02 on 20 August and held by the tape desk at 04:58 today. That hold was correctly taken. Kitco and TradingEconomics were 0.81% apart on platinum and 1.56% apart on palladium, well outside the band gold and silver cleared, and the two-page rule says a mark nobody can corroborate does not get written. At press time those gaps are still there, at $13.40 or 0.71% on platinum and $21.50 or 1.61% on palladium, and they are disclosed here rather than reconciled. What the disagreement does not support is either held mark. Platinum's $1,799.00 sits below both live readings, $1,881.00 and $1,894.40. Palladium's $1,308.00 sits below both $1,336.00 and $1,357.50. Kitco is taken as the tie-break because it is the board already carrying gold and silver on this tape.

§2The two marks that sat below everybody.

Gold and silver each cleared their second page cleanly. TradingEconomics read gold at $4,582.37, seventy-seven cents or 0.017% from the mark printed here, and silver at $69.43, twelve cents or 0.17% away. The gold-to-silver ratio, this desk's division of its own gold mark by its own silver mark on the same board at the same minute, reads 66.10 against 67.31 on 20 August marks: 1.21 points narrower, in a session where silver outran gold by 1.87 points of percentage. At 31.1035 grams to the troy ounce the four marks work out at $147.30 a gram of fine gold, $2.23 a gram of fine silver, $60.48 a gram of fine platinum and $42.95 a gram of fine palladium, all this desk's arithmetic. For a bench repricing stock this morning those are the working numbers, and gold's has added $3.20 a gram in a day.

§3What the move is, and what it is not.

TradingEconomics attributes the move, on both its gold and its silver page, to safe-haven buying through volatility in currency and bond markets and to the Treasury's plan to at least double its long-term debt buybacks, which drove yields and the dollar lower; on gold it adds continued central bank purchasing, particularly from China. Its platinum page adds a tight supply and demand balance, and its palladium page adds lower Russian output and South African processing disruption. The buyback is the same mechanism this paper reported yesterday, dated to the 19 August session, so the driver is not new. The breadth is. Yesterday platinum was the metal on which the two outside pages could not agree even about direction, one printing it down 0.94% and the other up 0.18%. Today all four metals are higher on both pages and on both bases.