Are platinum & palladium worth adding to your PM portfolio?

Reuters reported last week that “South Africa’s mining industry, unions and the government have committed to a broad plan to stem job losses, including boosting platinum by promoting the metal as a central bank reserve asset”. This is apparently an idea put forward by the World Platinum Investment Council in late 2014.

The idea got me thinking about the role of platinum and palladium in a precious metal portfolio. Generally I shy away from recommending them due to their lower liquidity compared to gold and silver and more volatile and industrial nature. As a theoretical exercise I thought I would extend the work done in this and this post to include platinum and palladium.


In those previous posts I was only dealing with two metals, which with 1% incremental changes only involves 101 different percentage allocations to run through. With four metals and a 5% increment, I was looking at over 1,771 different portfolios (assuming my macro was working correctly!)


Also, because I only had pricing data for the platinum group metals from mid 1990, I have just run the simulation from July 1990 to July 2015 with $100 being bought each month (total cash invested $30,000). The result in the chart below. [read more]