Platinum Demand Falling

In my previous article about platinum I pointed out it was time to trade gold for platinum. You would think that the time has come again to buy platinum, but I fear that the automobile industry is deteriorating again.

Rhodium prices keep falling and I already said that this means that this indicates that demand for vehicles in the automotive industry is dropping. The correlation between rhodium and the automotive industry was discussed in this article. 

If we look at the platinum to gold ratio (Chart 1) we see that the trend is going down. It is now at a platinum/gold ratio of 0.9. Historically platinum should be more expensive as gold but these days people are fleeing out of industrial commodities and into the safe asset of gold.

Chart 1: Platinum to Gold Ratio

However, during Q1 of 2012 investment demand recovered by 63,000 troy ounces. So a turnaround in platinum is possible.

Significance of Rhodium Prices on the automotive industry

Rhodium is a metal in the platinum group metals group (PGM) that nobody really knows about in the investor world. It isn't traded online through futures, while gold, silver and platinum does. You can only buy this metal physically through dealers which makes this metal perfectly unmanipulated. So I am very keen on using rhodium prices to find correlations in the macro-economic world as they are a very reliable indicator.

Rhodium prices are extremely inelastic, which means that its price is very dependant on supply and demand. If there is no supply and a lot of demand for rhodium, the price will skyrocket. The rhodium market is very small compared to the gold market and will have high volatility and low liquidity. For example, prices in 2003 were below $US 1000/ounce, but went up to $US 10000/ounce, which is a ten fold increase (Chart 1).

Chart 1: Historical Rhodium Price

To read more about this trend correlation, visit: Significance of Rhodium Prices on the automotive industry.