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.