Gold, silver, and platinum have all been strong performance so far this year, but which has done the best? The table below presents the price of gold, silver, and platinum at the start of the year, today’s price, and the change. The performance of the S&P 500 is thrown in for good measure.
| 31 Dec 2008 | 17 Feb 2009 | Change | ||
| Gold | 869.75 | 968.00 | 98.25 | 11.30% |
| Silver | 10.79 | 13.90 | 3.11 | 28.82% |
| Platinum | 898.00 | 1,083.00 | 185.00 | 20.60% |
| S&P 500 | 903.25 | 789.17 | (114.08) | -12.63% |
Silver has been the best performer so far this year with a gain of 29%, followed by platinum with a gain of 20.6%, and gold with a gain of 11.30%. The S&P 500 is down over 12%.
Silver and platinum were both down significantly in 2008 (see 2008 precious metals performance) so they are making up for some of their lost ground. Gold is continuing its moderate but steady price appreciation. Gold has had a positive return every year for the past eight years, even amidst the wild fluctuations in virtually every other asset class.
The line up above looked somewhat familiar, so I also decided to pull price data for the exact same time period, but one year earlier. Here is the result:
| 31 Dec 2007 | 17 Feb 2008 | Change | ||
| Gold | 833.75 | 912.50 | 78.75 | 9.45% |
| Silver | 14.76 | 17.38 | 2.62 | 17.75% |
| Platinum | 1,530.00 | 2,060.00 | 530.00 | 34.64% |
| S&P 500 | 1,468.36 | 1,349.99 | (118.37) | -8.06% |
As you can see, last year started off eerily similar. Stocks were weak and precious metals were strong, led by platinum and silver. Gold, silver, and platinum would all rise to their peak prices in early March. After that prices started to deteriorate, and then deteriorate at an accelerated pace as the wheels fell off the stock market.
Will this be a break out year for previous metals, or a re-run of last year?
I think silver is definitely bound to continue rising. It’s a by-product of copper mining which has almost slowed to a halt with copper prices falling 60%. I don’t know as much about platinum. In the longterm platinum will be strong, but I don’t know about this year, with the auto industry as weak as it is.