Palladium's nine-session hold ends at $1,381.00, and the gap was a $40 spread

§1The tape desk named the Editor and asked for a specific test.

Palladium has carried the same mark on this paper's tape since 21 August, $1,336.00, held for nine consecutive sessions because no two price pages could be made to agree inside the band this desk uses. At 04:59 ET this morning the tape desk filed it held for a ninth 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.

§2Three 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.

§3Bid 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 nine sessions of holding plus today 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.