Platinum price today, live, and why it is not gold

Signals, right now

Platinum is an industrial metal that people mistake for a monetary one

It sits beside gold in the jewellery case, but most of the demand is autocatalysts, chemical and petroleum refining catalysts, and increasingly electrolysers for hydrogen. That makes it far closer to copper than to gold in how it behaves: it falls in a growth scare rather than rallying in one. Anyone buying it as a store of value is buying a bet on industrial production wearing a precious metal's name.

Supply is concentrated in a way gold's is not

A large majority of mined platinum comes from a small number of operations in southern Africa, so the supply side is exposed to power rationing, shaft closures and labour disputes in a way a globally distributed metal is not. That concentration is why platinum can produce a single-hour move on the chart above with no change in demand at all, and why its realised volatility can exceed gold's by a wide margin in a quiet week for the rest of the market.

The relationship with palladium is the trade people actually run

Platinum and palladium substitute for one another in autocatalysts, with a lag and at some engineering cost. When the ratio between them stretches far enough, manufacturers reformulate, which pulls it back. That substitution is the closest thing this market has to a valuation anchor, and it is why the two prices are usually read together rather than alone.

The part we cannot verify

Pacifica publishes the symbol, the live book and hourly candles. It does not publish how the platinum reference price is derived, nor the interval its funding rate settles over, so the funding figure above is per interval and not annualised. The price was checked against an independent platinum quote when this page was built and agreed to within a quarter of a percent.