About the platinum price
Platinum is rarer than gold and yet usually cheaper, which surprises people: its price is set by industrial demand rather than by hoarding, and most of it goes into autocatalysts for diesel engines. Supply is unusually concentrated - South Africa accounts for the majority of world output - so a mining disruption there moves the price more than demand normally does.
Buying and holding platinum in Australia
Platinum is one of the two metals the market calls PGMs, short for platinum group metals, the other being palladium. By convention that label covers just those two rather than the wider chemical group, and the pairing matters because their markets behave like each other far more than either behaves like gold.
Scale is the first thing a buyer meets. Wholesale platinum settles in plates and ingots of one to six kilograms, where gold moves in bars of roughly 400 ounces. A twice-daily London benchmark still exists, run by ICE Benchmark Administration. It prices the wholesale market rather than the retail one, and it is quoted in US dollars, so an Australian figure carries the AUD/USD rate inside it. A thinner market shows up elsewhere. There are fewer bars and coins to choose from, fewer sellers holding stock at any moment, and a wider gap between what a dealer sells at and what the same dealer buys back at. That two-way gap is the real cost of holding a metal that trades less often, and no quoted price shows it.
The route to owning some is the ordinary bullion one. Bars and coins come from a mint or a bullion dealer, and metal can be left in storage with the seller instead, held either as specific bars or as a claim on the institution. What differs from gold is not the mechanism but how much choice there is at each step.
Platinum does clear the Australian tax test, and the four metals here do not all sit the same way. Platinum of at least 99 per cent fineness, in an investment form, is precious metal under the GST Act, so it is input taxed. That is the most forgiving of the three fineness thresholds the Act sets. A platinum wedding band is made of the metal but is not in an investment form, and is taxed like any other piece of jewellery.
Longer read: What platinum does in a catalytic converter, and why it competes with palladium. The largest single use of platinum is cleaning exhaust gas, and which of two metals a manufacturer reaches for has been an open commercial question for years. What decides it, and what the rest of platinum demand looks like.
See other metals and markets on the Australian markets hub.