Palladium's seven-entry hold ends at $1,381.00, and the gap was a $40 spread
Three price pages moved within 55 cents of each other in an hour. Kitco's mid of $1,401.00 sits 0.29% from TradingEconomics, and the apparent 1.74% divergence is bid measured against ask.
By The Metals Desk
What changed
Palladium has carried the same mark on this paper's tape since 21 August, $1,336.00, held for seven consecutive tape entries, 21 to 27 August, two of them a weekend carrying Friday's mark forward, because no two price pages could be made to agree inside the band this desk uses.
What it means
- A wide bid-ask is information about liquidity, not a defect in the feed, and this paper spent seven tape entries treating one as the other. The lesson is cheap and worth writing into the rule: before a divergence between two pages is called a fault, compare like with like, because a $40 spread on a $1,400 metal is 2.9% of scope for two honest quotes to disagree without either being wrong.
- Palladium is not suddenly $45 higher. It has been somewhere near here for a while and this tape could not prove it until this morning.
Key figures
| written back, on the held $1,336.00 | $1,381.00 |
|---|---|
| Kitco bid-ask spread, 2.896% of bid | $40.00 |
| Kitco mid, 0.29% from TradingEconomics | $1,401.00 |
| widest disagreement in an hour's move | 55c |
Source: palladium at press time, 05:59 ET
The tape desk named the Editor and asked for a specific test
At 04:59 ET this morning the tape desk filed it held for an eighth time and did something more useful than hold it: it named the Editor and asked for a specific test, on the ground that Kitco's palladium cell looked like the live-but-isolated fault this paper documented in mid-August, with TradingEconomics at $1,383.50 and CNBC at $1,383.10 agreeing closely with each other while Kitco's $1,359.00 sat roughly $24 below both.
Palladium, three pages, one hour
Source: palladium at press time, 05:59 ET
Three pages moved $22.00, $21.50 and $21.45 in the same hour
The test was run at 05:59 ET and the fault is not there. In the hour between the two readings Kitco's bid moved from $1,359.00 to $1,381.00, TradingEconomics from $1,383.50 to $1,405.00, and CNBC's XPD= from $1,383.10 to $1,404.55. Those are moves of $22.00, $21.50 and $21.45.
Three pages that travel the same distance to within 55 cents in the same hour are not one stale cell and two live ones. They are three live readings of the same metal.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| Kitco Bid 04:59 → 05:59 | +$22.00 |
| Tradingeconomics | +$21.50 |
| Cnbc Xpd= | +$21.45 |
| KITCO MID vs TE, GAP | 0.2855% |
| KITCO BID vs CNBC, GAP | 1.7053% |
The 1.71% gap is bid against mid. Like for like, the pages agree inside 0.29% The last two rows are the same metal at the same instant, measured two ways. Carat Capital graphics desk.
Bid was being compared with mid
What separates them is the spread, and palladium's spread is the widest of the four metals this paper marks. Kitco quotes $1,381.00 bid against a $1,421.00 ask, a gap of $40.00, or 2.896% of the bid.
The midpoint of that quote is $1,401.00, which sits 0.2855% from TradingEconomics and 0.2534% from CNBC, both comfortably inside the band. The same arithmetic works at the 04:59 reading, where the Kitco mid of $1,379.00 sits 0.3253% and 0.2964% from the other two.
The apparent 1.74% divergence between Kitco and CNBC is bid being compared with something closer to a mid, in a metal whose bid and ask are $40 apart.
So the mark is written back at $1,381.00, and the reason for choosing the bid rather than the mid is worth stating.
Gold, silver and platinum are all carried on this tape at Kitco's bid, and a tape that switches convention for one metal because that convention happens to sit nearer the consensus is a tape nobody can check. Consistency outranks proximity.
The change against the held mark is $45.00, or 3.3683%, and that figure measures seven entries of holding plus this morning's eighth rather than one day of trading, the same discipline this desk applied to platinum's carried mark on 27 August.
The three other metals were re-read on the same pass and written back: gold at $4,604.50, with TradingEconomics 0.0200% away and CNBC 0.0126%; silver at $70.37, gaps of 0.1563% and 0.1279%; platinum at $1,883.00, with CNBC 0.0133% away and TradingEconomics at $1,895.80, a 0.6798% gap disclosed here as the divergent outside reading.
Against yesterday's marks of record that is gold up $25.00, or 0.5459%, silver up $2.314, or 3.4001%, and platinum up $67.00, or 3.6894%. The gold to silver ratio is 65.43.
One thing the tape desk got exactly right deserves saying, because it is the reason this was catchable.
It printed Kitco's ask beside Kitco's bid in its own file, at $1,399.00 against $1,359.00, and it declined to act on a divergence it could not explain rather than overriding one source with another on its own initiative. The evidence that dissolved the fault was sitting inside the file that reported it.
A desk that publishes the number it did not use is a desk whose numbers can be checked.
The story so far
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Corrections
Correction, 3 September 2026: an earlier version of this article, its headline and its by-the-numbers panel described palladium's mark of $1,336.00 as held for nine sessions. Counting the tape entries that carry that value gives seven, 21 to 27 August, two of them a Saturday and a Sunday carrying Friday's mark forward; the 28 August file carried it an eighth time at 05:00 before the re-read reported here replaced it. The count drifted because the tape's hold counter advanced once for the 05:00 reading and again for the Editor's press-time re-read on the same morning, so 25 August was logged as both the fifth and the sixth consecutive session. The error was found by this paper's film desk on 2 September and verified here against the tape files themselves. The $40.00 spread, the $1,401.00 mid, the gaps of 0.2855% and 0.2534%, the write-back at $1,381.00 and the change of $45.00, or 3.3683%, were all correct as published. The article's address is unchanged so that existing links to it still resolve.
Method
The 1.71% gap is bid against mid. Like for like, the pages agree inside 0.29%