The Friday Metals 08062010

It’s Friday after 5:00 pm in the New York (Eastern) time zone and time to look at the metals’ close prices for the week along with their overall performance for the month and compared to last Friday.

First, there’s gold:

30 Day Gold Performance 08-06-2010

Next comes silver:

30 Day Silver Performance 08-06-2010

Now, there’s platinum:

30 Day Platinum Performance 08-06-2010

Last, there’s palladium:

30 Day Palladium Performance 08-06-2010

What interesting variations from chart to chart. Silver has encountered a very bumpy ride for the last 30 days. Gold’s ups and downs are also frequent if not quite as dramatic. Whereas, platinum and palladium have been mountain climbing with a few dips along the way.

Let’s look at the highs and lows over the last 30 days:

  30 day high 30 day low Aug 6 Last Difference between
High and Low
Gold $1,216.00 $1,157.00 $1,205.70 4.9%
Silver $18.50 $17.47 $18.46 5.6%
Platinum $1,597.00 $1,499.00 $1,571.00 6.1%
Palladium $514.00 $432.00 $489.00 16.0%

 

Next, take a look at today’s close prices on the New York market compared to last Friday’s:

  Jul 30 Last Aug 6 Last Percent Change Dollar
Change
Gold $1,181.40 $1,205.70 2.1% $24.30
Silver $17.97 $18.46 2.7% $0.49
Platinum $1,569.00 $1,571.00 0.1% $2.00
Palladium $496.00 $489.00 -1.4% -$7.00

 

Look at platinum. At $1597 on Monday, it came close to kissing the $1600 mark – a new 30 day high. Though, it has quite a distance to travel to get back to the high in May of $1752.

Palladium also started off the week on a high note at $514. It’s earlier high in May was at $571.

Using the Friday close, the actual dollars to get back to their highs are $181 for platinum and $81 for palladium. But, in looking at percentages of the total, platinum has roughly 12% and palladium has roughly 17% to get back to the earlier highs.

What about the more volatile gold and silver metals?

Here’s another area where they differ. Silver had a high of $19.64 back in April/May period. But, gold enjoyed its high of $1261 in late June/early July.

Using today’s close prices, gold has roughly $55 or 5% to get back to its recent high. On the other hand, silver has to gain $1.18 or roughly 6% to get back to the $19.64 peak.

The metals and their peaks and valleys continue to be a source of entertainment along with the various pundits’ comments of why the increase or the decrease in the various metals. They also entertain us with their various predictions which tend to be all across the board. Plus, it’s interesting when the metals perform counter to what the pundits expect.

We’ll take another look at the metals next Friday.