Platinum Overview

PLATINUM: Preciously Rare

Treasured for its beauty since its discovery in the 1500s, platinum is the rarest of all precious metals. It is 15 to 20 times rarer than gold and 120 times rarer than silver. Platinum is much more than a just precious metal. It is also one of the most essential industrial commodities in the world.

It is used to produce one out of every five consumer goods and, because of its remarkable properties: (resistance to corrosion, 3,215 degree melting point, electric conductivity and high durability), industry is constantly finding new uses for it.

This extremely versatile metal is known as the environmental metal because much of newly minted Platinum goes into the environmental protection devices used in the global war on pollution. It is also called the strategic metal because of its importance in high technology industries and systems. In fact, Platinum is stockpiled by the U.S. Department of Defense. Other sources of Platinum demand include the telecommunications, petroleum, medical, pharmaceutical, chemical, and jewelry industries.

Platinum as an Investment

Platinum is currently trading at (-/+) $2,000 per ounce. Perhaps the emerging precious metal investment alternative as we march on to this millennium.

Portfolio Diversification

The foreign currency market once provided the ideal portfolio diversification vehicle to protect against market fluctuations, but as the US dollar drops, currency around the world is also devalued. Therefore, professional money managers seeking to diversify their investments have extended into hard assets like Platinum bullion, which provides a safe/secure investment that can be easily turned to cash at any time.