Carat$297.00 off gold and $170.00 off platinum: every mark lower since Friday
Gold $4,307.50 and platinum $1,713.00 at press time, the fifth consecutive lower mark for each on this tape. Gold has given up 6.45% since 28 August, platinum 9.03%, and silver more than either at 9.68%.
§1Four metals re-read, four written back.
All four metals were re-read off the Kitco board at press time on Wednesday and all four were lower. Gold $4,307.50 the ounce, down $20.20 or 0.4668% on the prior close. Platinum $1,713.00, down $24.00 or 1.3817%. Silver $63.56, down $0.394 or 0.6161%. Palladium $1,286.00, down $1.00 or 0.0777%, which on a board this size is flat. Every one of those readings differed from the 05:00 mark, and every one has been written back to this paper's tape before this edition built, so the numbers printed here are the numbers the tape carries. A second page was read for gold: Trading Economics had spot at $4,305.69, 0.065% off Kitco's midpoint, which is inside the band and leaves nothing to disclose.
§2Five marks, and every one lower.
The session itself is unremarkable. The run behind it is not. Gold has printed a lower mark on this tape at every reading since Friday 28 August: $4,604.50, then $4,454.40, then $4,444.80, then $4,366.10, and now $4,307.50. That is $297.00 off the ounce, 6.45%, across five marks. Platinum has done the same thing without a single higher reading in between, $1,883.00 down to $1,713.00, a fall of $170.00 or 9.03%. Silver and palladium each managed one higher mark on the way, so neither run is unbroken, but both metals are materially lower across the span.
§3Gold has lost the least of the four.
Rank the four by what they have lost since 28 August and the order is not the one the headlines imply. Silver is worst at 9.68%, from $70.37 to $63.56. Platinum follows at 9.03%. Palladium has lost 6.88%, from $1,381.00 to $1,286.00. Gold, the metal everyone is watching, has lost the least of the four at 6.45%. The gold-silver ratio sits at 67.77 against 65.43 on 28 August, so an ounce of gold buys 2.34 more ounces of silver than it did five marks ago. The platinum-palladium ratio has gone the other way, 1.363 to 1.332, because palladium has barely moved this session while platinum took the largest percentage fall of the four.
§4The direction, not the contested number.
On the cause this desk prints the direction and withholds the contested number, as it did on Tuesday. Trading Economics, read this morning, attributes the pressure to rising Treasury yields and to expectations of a Federal Reserve rate rise. Outside estimates of the September probability still differ by more than twenty points across the outlets this desk reads, so no probability is printed here. What is not in dispute is the arithmetic on a cost sheet.
A retailer who bought casting gold against the 28 August ounce is carrying stock priced $297.00 above today's metal, and a retailer buying this week is buying 6.45% cheaper than one who bought last Friday.
Five marks is a run, not yet a trend, and the useful reading is which metals fell together rather than how far gold fell.
When silver and platinum lose nine per cent while gold loses six, the trade is selling the whole complex and not expressing a view on any one of them. For the bench that matters more than the gold number, because platinum at $1,713.00 and silver at $63.56 reset the cost of every setting and every chain in the case, not only the yellow ones. Price the case off today's board, not off the week the metal was bought.
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