Gold, Silver, and the Metals to Watch in 2021 with Nick Frappell (Global GM of ABC Bullion)

hi shay russell here from fat tail media and joining me today from the sydney office is nick frappell the general man our global general manager i believe of abc bullion nick thank you for being here today thank you very much for having me now our timing uh couldn't be better now this interview between us has been in the works for a couple of weeks uh but we just happen to be placing our interview right on the back of the short squeeze in silver so it's sort of structured what we're going to talk about today but before we talk about silver and the shenanigans that are happening over in the silver market of course i cannot have somebody who is the global general manager of a gold bullion dealer sit in front of me and not ask the very first question which is gold what's happening and we've seen a gold in the fall in the gold price there's been um you know none of the shenanigans that are happening in silver managed to lift it up out of this trading range that it's stuck in is it the paper market that's just not moving is physical demand you know increasing at your end what trends are you guys seeing well i think the main thing about gold at the moment you're right it's really a sideways market with some pretty ugly moves uh on on both sides but certainly some pretty tough dips lately given that you know we believe it's a dip buying market but a lot of that from the you know this if you look at the period from new year onwards is the dollar index has been staging um you know a recovery and that generally has traded headwinds for gold also near the beginning of the year early january when the uh the u.s bond market starts to look at the spending plans for the incoming uh democrat biden administration uh initially the bond market took a little bit of fright and it was a bit of a reset bond prices dropped yields spiked and when they spiked gold came off quite sharply because um yields and gold price sort of you know inversely related uh now yields have come back because the bond market's basically sort of taken a more sanguine view of how that supply is going to be dealt with by the market and the more relaxed view so yields have fallen again and that has supported the the gold price but at the same time in the other direction you've had this slightly stronger dollar now technically where gold has found support although it has been gently shading off it's come to the top of a technical indicator that um i look at quite often and it's quite popular in foreign exchange and gold market called the ichimoku cloud if you look at the weekly chemoku cloud and we can certainly uh look put a slide of this later um the weekly cloud top which is a first line of support is just pretty close to where we're at now so gold is bullish it's trending up it's near a support level it's certainly in a situation where um all of the positive indicators that tend to support gold bar the recent million dollars generally are supporting it um just going back to your question or going on to a question about physical we've noticed a definite pick up in actual physical demand uh lately in the last couple of weeks around asia uh the shanghai gold exchange has moved back i think into a small premium and we're seeing the demand emerged from other asian hubs um certainly in singapore and other neighboring neighboring nations so uh physical is actually looking better and the the outlooks yeah it looks good i mean you have to kind of abstract a little bit stand a little bit further back and say yeah it still looks good but if you just looked at the last six weeks two months um yeah you could have been chopped to ribbons for sure yeah actually i like that take that you've got there is that you've just got to stand back um now uh what we'll do too is i'll make sure i put a link to your monthly reports that you send out because your clients um you send them an in-depth report about your technical analysis each month on what's happening uh so if people are new to technical analysis your reports are actually a great way to start to get the um start to get some understanding of you know what you're talking about when you talk about your ichimoku clouds because uh while i am familiar with them i myself don't use them as one and they can sort of be the next step up to for technical traders um i just wanted to circle back to something you said there you talked about the rising demand in the asian markets which is great to see and i think people should keep that in the back of their mind when it comes to precious metals that despite the spot price of gold has sold off but you're seeing physical demand increase in the asian market uh what about uh retail demand in australia are you seeing i mean i've been to your offices before i know you've got very busy um you know a shop front there are you seeing an increased inflow of you know people walking through the doors demanding their bullying is good demand is definitely good for gold and it has been good for for quite some time um and particularly you know with these dips have been good opportunities for people of course the really big thing has been just recently with silver uh silver has obviously seen a really big uh uptick in in demand uh so i'd say it's a little bit silver that's silver dominant at the moment but yeah gold demand both gold and silver demand on the retail front domestically uh both for just general retail buyers and also for people with self-managed super funds uh it's certainly been risk and um you know with uh well we'll go on to silver and you'll probably drill down some you know more precise questions there so yeah that's about to say stop stop answering because you're going to take away all my questions um all right look we do have to talk about silver because silver is the story of the past seven days which i find really funny because you know normally silva gets you know you can't pay you can't buy this sort of publicity for love nor money for silver and the past seven days it all started with a computer a game shop i believe it is that nobody had ever heard of before aside from a few hardcore fans and somehow we've seen this enormous uh populist traitor movement into silver my phone's blowing up with messages from conspiracy theorists or people just looking for answers to demystify what's happening in silver so i think we really do need to spend some time around this and try and remove some of the mystery because i'm not one for conspiratorial theories i often find that you know the truth is stranger than fiction to begin with um but first of all let's talk about the big price action like we're talking a 20 jump in the past 48 hours now i know it has sold off just a tiny little bit but how often do we see jumps like this in silver and does this change the technical setup for the physical price of the metal uh well we've looked first first of all the technicals for silver have looked pretty good for quite a while um so and we've been sort of saying that you know fairly regularly the the price is above certain levels where um you know it's in trend both at the daily time frame and also the weekly time frame so it's been positive for a while i had some really big gyrations obviously um you know a while back uh and you know if you look far enough back certainly at the uh kind of march of last year where it presented a fantastic opportunity um but it's been looking good for a while and when we sort of talk about say has it breaking out that's a really interesting question i think the really key breakout for me was in june of last year end of may june last year when it broke up above the weekly cloud after that really precipitous drop that it had when all markets were going through a huge kind of reset around about the time people realize the enormity or likely enormity of the impact of coving so that's obviously a long while ago and it has made huge progress since um excuse me someone's in a hurry all right really yeah no that's okay keep going so um but i think the breakout that's perhaps you know more relevances of the here and now is after silver made that fairly recent high right about 30 ish um a while ago in us dollar terms it's formed a sort of a kind of a broad roughly kind of penance looking pattern which if we break up above above that level shows every sign that we could um extend higher and uh extend higher perhaps by an equivalent length to the uh previous previous rise so in u.s dollar terms we're looking at 39 to low 40s that's you know possibly just gonna let the last set of crooks go get chased by me um so so that recent breakout which happened this week or potential breakout it doesn't you know it's it's a little bit too early to say that thing about penance they can kind of tease you a bit um what we're seeing uh today was actually a fairly decent drop in the price and uh i'll be charitable and i'll say that that drop is perhaps a a re-test of the breakout if that pennant pattern is true and follows past sort of you know past behaviors we certainly have scope for a fairly big uplift i also look at another kind of chart which occasionally i think you know you've seen and we've talked about which is point and figure and point figure is interesting because it actually gives a very specific price targets uh which if the price makes that target it doesn't go back up below a certain level that target remains valid and they're pretty uncanny actually so i'm going to give you that slide as well um but basically i've got two targets there and the one on the slide i'll show you is to 42 u.s so that sort of gives you an idea um can i just i think you want to say a few things about game stock and maybe similarities or just similarities to silver is that worth exploring oh it absolutely is um thank you very much for getting there do you know what's funny i really before we get to that i really enjoy technical analysis so for all of the fellow technical analysis nerds watching there's an awful lot of value to take away from what nick's saying um all right so i do also want to talk about um we'll go to gamestop now but basically what happened in gamestop sort of it shook the markets when nobody thought something like this could happen you know we're essentially looking at the mobilization of retail traders and they shifted a stock in a certain direction now they tried to do that with silver but obviously it's come off the boil so do you think you've got any insight i mean you've got an institutional banking back uh bullion background so is there anything you can explain here to help you know investors understand that this isn't that markets are being manipulated it's that um you know investors aren't going to be able to nudge silver in the same direction that they are able to move gamestop i think if you look at the sort of returns and the sort of incredible move in game stock uh that's right doing that in silver would be just kind of semi-unthinkable um although you know strange things have happened the the really key difference are that when you look at gamestop or nokia or you know any any uh kind of vaguely similar share there's a finite amount of shares you can buy um silver's a bit different one thing it might not be the biggest market in the world but there's over a billion ounces of silver being consumed before being supplied every year and the market is in something of a surplus um reliable data shows that it's in a surplus so that's a really substantial entity or that's a really different beast to say trying to chase out some shorts in uh you know like a mid-sized company for example the other thing is that you know silver silver is there's there's really substantial stocks and every day more is arriving so it's a big beast relatively um if you look at the combined stocks in london and hong kong sorry london and new york we actually can there are public reportable stocks stock levels it's about 1.45 billion

ounces at the moment so now with the london figures i'm relying on something from about eight weeks ago uh i don't think they've changed dramatically because if you look at the data series it doesn't change much if you look at new york um those figures are kind of last week so very recent so uh it's it's pretty huge there's also substantial amounts of silver in hong kong and india different series is that no one's telling you how much there is but it's still it's a lot so there's big above ground stocks that's a that makes a difference the other thing really different is that if you look at what the redditors are doing they're looking at it and they're their line of thinking is that there are some really big shorts out there and their editors are gonna you know go at them um there are some big shorts out there the producers have some really substantial hedges on so those guys are short the thing you have to remember with the producer is when they're short they're all they were naturally long to begin with so they're just selling ford metal that they've got underground that they're hopefully going to successfully dig up and get smelted or refined if you look at the banking uh i say banking but i'll call them the swap dealer sector because that's the uh category under which they are found within the comex reportable numbers it looks like they're quite short too um the numbers like 251 million ounces or something so it looks quite large but when you're running a ford book at a bank or a you know metals trading house and you're short of comex silver you are not naked nobody is going to be short that amount of silver um that's just kind of bonkers so what happens is you are short the futures and you are long inventory you're kind of long if you like at the warehouse or you're long otc and if um if you look at the evolution and the change and growth in those fault dealer positions what's very very obvious is that they go up and down just as positions of the hedge funds or manage money investors go up go up and down so if investors buy loads and loads and loads of silver the swap dealer position kind of is the inverse it it gets bigger but the other way now that doesn't mean that the swap dealer is saying well look you know commodity trading advisor you just bought 10 million ounces of silver off me or 200 000 ounces sold off me i'm taking the other side of that bed that's not a great way to be you'll cover that but you'll use a device called an exchange for physical to make sure that even if you bought the silver bag on the exchange you'll flip that long back into the into the spot book the reason why is because you actually get paid out for being short the futures um and i don't want i know that we had this discussion where you didn't want it to be overly overly technical i don't want to be overly technical but if you are short futures in a market with an upward trade it's for upward yield curve which generally silver and gold do have then you get paid for rolling that position along um that's just the way it works and it means you don't have any price risk but you have an extra little earner in your ford book so it doesn't you know it's not it's not free money and you know not easy as easy as it sounds there are times when you get dinged but generally it's just an extra earnings so that's why the swap dealer position they they position themselves that way around to think that it's a naked short of that size would be a really tremendous misreading of what's going on so that's just a kind of like if you like a hopefully an easy explanation that it's not quite what it looks like um i really like this oh i'm throwing my pen around that's the second time i've done that for an interview this week um i really like that explanation you've just given me because uh a lot of the futures markets appear murky and sometimes there's been this attitude of oh well if we can't see through it it there must be fraud or manipulated or like all these sort of names are applied uh but it is just because uh the commodities market are quite difficult to understand there's you know it's worth a few trillion dollars and there's millions of moving parts to it so i really appreciate uh that that insight and that's nowhere near as technical as the explanation you gave me over the phone the other day so that's great now i have managed to throw my pen to the other side of the room so i'll just quickly retrieve that and hopefully nobody notices uh now before we go on because i really want to start talking um about two precious other two other precious metals that already uh most people don't actually look at right but i believe down in your younges or back in your young years which couldn't have been that long ago nick uh you were a little bit of a platinum and a palladium trader and you were telling me something about a gamma trade story that happened way back in the day that's very silver to the silver squeeze we've just witnessed yeah sure um well that's that's right i'll i'll perhaps we should talk a little bit about platinum and palladium just a really really um sort of a reminder of what they're there for and why they're so useful um because the really the big thing about platinum and palladium is that they're they're important metals for environmental purposes they they help clean car and truck exhausts um they have their own kind of little advantages relative to each other so platinum traditionally has been a better metal for a diesel um catalyst catalytic cleaning and palladium has been better for uh gasoline engine cars that's one of the things that's actually hurt platinum lately is people's appetite to buy diesel cars has actually declined in the last um last couple of years uh partly because people are much more aware that diesels older diesels produce particulates and they were kind of put off by that so um but these the autocad element of platinum palladium demand is really incredibly important in fact if you look at um demand for palladium it's uh 85 of all palladium demand is driven by the car and truck industry i should say the car industry because it's gasoline it's coming from the gasoline side um for the platinum side i think it's like 36 or 37 it's coming from it's coming from the um the the car and and light truck uh side so these are really they're really special metals they are used for other things and when i traded um platinum you know it was important for a whole bunch of things including glass manufacturer high high quality glass manufacturer uh chemicals and i guess you could look at the three the three prongs or the three legs upon which you generally find yourself quoting people you'd always be quoting hedge funds and other other financial entities you'd be quoting car companies who buy platinum ford and you'd also have uh oil companies that want to use platinum because in a kind of unexpected way you use platinum to clean uh you know car and truck emissions but you also use platinum to help make really really high quality gasoline so when you look at a uh an oil refinery from afar somewhere in there is a chunk of platinum so um so if you've kind of got all of those customer bases covered off those are the kinds of people that you're dealing with and you're you're lending to your refineries you're actually borrowing from the car companies because they buy platinum one two three years forward you cover that in the spot market so you end up with a two or three year platinum loan which you can then flip around and lend to the oil companies um so you know again there's lots of moving parts um kind of interesting and palladium's slightly different you've got the car company element and you've got you know other other types of uh consumer as well and you've got you know the ever-present investment community so one of the things that happened to me and you know this kind of goes back to a little bit similar to the gamestop thing where a bunch of guys decided to um run in the platinum market and i think they were sort of you know they weren't this was before the days of reddit or you know this wasn't a retail thing uh but anyway um i was trading spot i had a spot platinum book and a ford platinum book and i've always had these calls from this money market broker he said nick you know if you ever want to make me a platinum price through the broker through me you know i said yeah of course you've done me a lot of you know you've you've always been a great goal broker and i was kind of thinking this guy's never even broke silver like when is he ever going to ask me platinum anyway one friday night he said on the box he said oh where he said he saw nick i'm not going to do his swiss accent but he he said oh nick he said can you just make me a one month platinum quote so i said uh yeah sure i will and uh so i made a move one and uh he he goes uh hello i borrow 5 000 ounces without even drawing breath i'm like okay that's like friday night i'm literally like my colleagues are waving from the door saying rappers your beer is going cold because it was in england and uh um i was like guys i just got to wait for a bit and i hopped on the line and said who's the name on the other side and uh i want to say exactly who it is but um the company was uh satirized in rolling stone as a vampire squid so i thought i better quickly cover that so i called another uh us trading desk and borrowed it back and then said okay all done i'm out for beers so in effect i had borrowed and lent platinum very quickly for one month at what was the equivalent of about four percent i then went home and forgot all about it i came to work on monday and things looked a bit different the price was higher a lot higher and when i looked at the ford curve and the first thing i heard was someone shouting to the broker that one of another bank had just borrowed platinum at 85 for one month platinum interest rates had gone up 80 percent between the close on friday or suddenly when i left and entering the office on monday um that then followed an incredibly hectic week i think it went up to about 105 that day and then a bit of sanity began to reassert itself and um that was a great day for me and the following day was not a great day for me all of the moves all of all of my revaluation kind of went the other way um i was very fortunate to escape kind of more or less unscathed um it was a really tricky it was a bit of a tricky week um it was also hell on wheels making spot uh that that week um that that month it's difficult to break it down because i think i've got the chance somewhere near me but i i need a magnifying glass to look back at that weeks it was march 2008 um that month had a 500 trading range and i think the previous decade hadn't seen a year with a trading range bigger than 50 bucks or something and i think most of that monthly trading range was monday and tuesday wednesday of that week it was um just beyond uh it was crazy and the reason why it was crazy and this is where it goes back to the gamestop story is that what a bunch of funds have done was they'd gone in and they'd bought platinum they borrowed platinum and they bought upside platinum call options which is like like a favorite trick of some of the uh revenators and what happens is when you buy the upside calls and you buy if the price starts moving towards those core strikes the people who are short those calls have a have a choice rather buy the calls back which they probably won't because the calls are probably now more valuable so they're locking in a loss um the other thing they have to do is they have to buy the underlying in this case platinum spot because they have to that's the only way they can hedge their short delta sorry their short option position and that when they do that and it starts pulling the market higher that's basically when you've got what the relatives you know people call it gamma squeeze of course once those options expire then the gamma squeeze element disappears unless you try it on again um and if you look at a chart of platinum the next month basically it you know kind of well fell very fast so um so yeah that was that was uh certainly experience so it was uh yeah kind of interesting um it's it's funny you've mentioned that i've actually got a couple of questions and we're going to get to them um so that you said march 2008 that's right essentially as the u.s stock markets broke from the financial crisis yeah um look i think at the time a lot of a lot of commodities were really doing incredibly well um i can't remember where crude was around about that time but crude was doing um sort of too well and subsequently crashed um interestingly crude broke through 100 bucks and our crude analyst said if you are long of crude at this level of crude futures the crude futures curve is so tilted up that it costs you twenty dollars a roll or ten dollars a roll just to be long which is kind of the inverse of being short for the silver shorts i was telling you about yep um so what that means is is that crude has to go up 20 just to pay you for being long the moment people realize that it's gonna absolutely fall like a stone and a month later i think it i i can't remember just how terribly fast it fell but the point is that a lot of different commodity classes were really really i think copper was doing you know i don't think it was all march that year but if you look at that year it really was the year to be long of commodity as long as you got out at the right time yeah yes and not everybody did um okay now before we start talking about where platinum and palladium are gonna go uh because you know we're still yet to make the investment case for them i'm still not you know i've been writing to my subscribers that i definitely think there's a future for platinum and palladium but something we need to touch on is the musk versus hydrogen debate so elon musk is currently leading the electric vehicle battery revolution which you know could stifle uh platinum and palladium demand uh but you and i had an off-camera conversation or actually on the phone the other day about the potential of hydrogen to disrupt this and actually increase the demand for platinum and palladium um do you have any further insights to this i have probably some basic insights um hopefully ones that are you know worth worth relating um look i think one thing is is that you know elon musk is you know he's an immensely clever guy and an immensely clever and good publicist so uh you know the first response to his statement which he made last year sometime was you know of course he would say that because he's you know up to the hilt in the battery business um and that's you know a reasonable thing for him to believe but on the other side there is a significant part of the business that is looking at hydrogen fuel cells and the impression i get is that those the battery electric vehicle and the hydrogen fuel cell kind of debate actually is much more complementary to each other than the kind of elon musk comment suggests the reason why is because model vehicles are the same and battery electric vehicles might be great for example for um you know a small car but certainly the hydrogen lobby are making a very good case that um electric fuel hydrogen fuel cells are significantly better um for for larger vehicles and for trucks and for so that's that's that's you know one big difference what kind of vehicle sector are you looking at the other thing is as well is that you can fill a hydrogen vehicle up relatively quickly and easily whereas a battery battery electric vehicle at the moment is still taking quite a long time to fill um now there's some talk that really really supercharged fast charging batteries around the corner and if they are that changes that that part of the equation naturally um because at the moment the problem that battery battery electric vehicles would have is the pace of charging is slow and you need a distribution network in by which you can charge easily so without that you know it doesn't really matter which one you've got the battery electric has an issue the other thing that matters is the precursors to making battery electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells battery electric vehicles they're growing fast from a very very small base so as they grow is that going to happen this is genuine question i don't know the answer is that going to have an impact further down the road metaphorically for things like rare earths lithium and so on because they're part of the battery supply chain too so you can't necessarily think of just you know batteries versus hydrogen in isolation and on the hydrogen side hydrogen's relatively easy to make using natural gas as a feedstock but if we're going to go towards you know net zero and all of those things that people are talking about then you need to sort of be able to make kind of green hydrogen now the pace of which you know it's all the answers to those questions how easy can we make green hydrogen how easily can we roll out networks to distribute um you know plug in your car or pump hydrogen into your car fast charging batteries availability of lithium all those infrastructural and supply chain issues are going to determine it but what is probably the case from the little that i see is that we'll end up in a world with probably both technologies um kind of coexisting uh not just the one technology and that's basically going to benefit if the more the hydrogen fuel cell story is a success the more that will benefit platinum because platinum and hydrogen fuel cells um you know go together um so and then the more the battery electric vehicle issue the more successful they are the more other metals are going to benefit and it won't be won't necessarily be pgms um i think that's a really good point that you've made there with the hydrogen and the ev battery debate is that the final metallurgy isn't really solved yet these are still new technologies that the market are playing with so we don't really know what uh how important these precious metals will be we just know what they can do right now and one of especially platinum and palladium is they're very good in high temperatures you know so much so better than gold and silver so that definitely changes the potential for the industrial demand for them to grow later on i guess that brings me to my next question which is if you're going to invest in precious metals especially ones like platinum and palladium do their prices at this point now behave like a commodity or do we see the prices in platinum and palladium behave a little more a little bit like precious metals like gold and silver well it's a bit of both because the pgms particularly platinum and palladium um you know are part of the precious complex but the difference is is that fundamentals matter in a way that they don't really matter to gold and silver because the above ground stocks and the sheer scale of the market platinum and palladium both have concentrations in terms of both geographically where they're from and in terms of you know the consumer end so for example this dependency on auto catalyst uh i would say that platinum is the favored metal i'll go out and limb and say that because platinum has a future even if the carbon economy changes rapidly so if we go to a more hydrogen economy platinum is still needed um in a way that palladium would be less necessary if there was a genuine reduction in the in the use of gasoline-powered cars i don't think any of that's going to happen tomorrow but the point is is that platinum has a use now but you can use platinum and gasoline-powered cars as well uh it's just that palladium is slightly more optimal in fact it's been a little bit of a surprise that given the decline in diesel engine you know car demand it's been a little bit of a surprise that there hasn't been some switching back to platinum um but be as that as it may the other thing is that um one thing is that you know the environmental and admissions standards that are in place today are only tightening so this is why even when fewer and fewer cars are fewer and fewer even if you have a year where fewer cars are sold there's still more demand for platinum and palladium because coatings in the capitalists are actually deeper and heavier and the reason for that is because more and more people are in immortal countries are insisting on the latest emissions standards and also because as people are also looking for more fuel efficient cars you get sort of things like lean burn technology and lean burn technology you need a heavier coating for the plastic for the platinum and palladium catalyst there too so you know when you look at countries that are relatively behind the curve in terms of emission control and i'd say you know big countries like indonesia india and so on perhaps some of the bigger african countries that are relatively smaller economies now but i'm sure in the future will be bigger say for example nigeria and so on um you know these guys are going to go they aren't going to go as we discussed you know progressively through like euro one two three they're gonna go very lightly straight to euro six or whatever the equivalent of euro six is in five or ten years time so that tends to really keep you know that that's a heavy demand for for these kind of metals so they're both useful but i think platinum platinum has a sort of more robust future because you can see where it works uh in a hydrogen economy um i think i guess that brings me to my final question for today now i know uh abc bullying actually sell platinum and palladium bars which uh unfortunately i didn't get to get my hands on when i was there last time in sydney however many eons ago i was allowed to travel um do you see many investors inquiring about them is it more institutional investment is it more self-managed funds i guess the point i'm trying to make is most people's relationship with platinum and palladium comes down to wedding ring shopping uh and looking maybe for some sort of uh speculative platinum group elements uh stock but the idea of owning the hard metal in their hands might be foreign to them so who do you see who are your main buyers of platinum and palladium bars um and also too like is the demand increasing or does the man's cover demand you know come and go with the news demand is definitely increasing and i'd say the people that really are interested in our platinum bars are um you know we as with gold and silver retail and smsf and the reason why people are interested and they've got growing interest in these bars is that you know apart from all of the things that we've said about how useful platinum is and it is a truly amazing metal i mean they've all got something to offer um but you know platinum does a tremendous amount in the background it's both an adornment metal and an investment metal and an industrial metal um the other thing is as well is that it has its own correlation uh or lack of to other metals and to other asset classes so that's also an appealing aspect to people who you know want to extend their their metals portfolio so yeah we're seeing growing demand um it's beautiful metal um you know that necessarily shouldn't necessarily um you know make a difference uh but it so it is it's a matter of growing popularity it's it's an incredibly important metal um we've stressed so much about talking about the autocad interest and so on the hydrogen fuel cells you know nascent kind of interest that could develop in the future but actually if you if you look behind all of those really really important uses it's actually got a bunch of industrial uses it's a it's a really essential metal and relative to gold and silver there's not a huge amount of it out there that's like 8 million ounces a year annual production i'm sorry a total total supply not annual production um so it's a relatively small market and definitely um one that you know should remain of interest and the other thing i'd say as well is that you know when lately when the price had dipped uh you know the cost of production for platinum is not cheap so it's not an easy metal to make it's not an easy metal to find it's not an easy metal to extract or smelt um in in places like south africa and russia and so on so that again is a big supporting factor uh you actually took the words right out of my mouth i was about to make a point about the cost per ounce extraction in south africa and this is before we add the processing on top of the metal uh i believe platinum's probably selling at a discount to what it actually cost to get it out of the mine in south africa at the moment i uh foolishly can't get the my price chart won't load so i can't even tell you what price it's trading at so that alone when you've got the what it's selling for let alone the cost of extraction before we even throw on the processing on it yes it helps make the case for why uh platinum in particular makes a good investment and you know what there's nothing wrong with investing in things that are shiny and pretty uh i have some wonderful gold jewelry that uh pallion group i bought from palliation group so you know what you know it's okay to invest in things just because you like the look of them yeah absolutely and one thing that so you know we were talking about silver earlier which i think is supposed to be the most lustrous metal on the planet or something but it's got again a beautiful and very interesting uh worthwhile industrial metal as well as a precious metal and as well as an investment but um you know we're the largest silver refiner in the southern hemisphere so you know we get a lot of metal that goes through our circuit and that means we're really well placed to actually deliver silver physical silver to the retail investors that come in and buy from us oh okay i did lie when i said one more question clearly okay so as you know there is this big kerfuffle in the us because of the short squeeze and apparently all the dealers are out of silver and i i know of one us dealer that has silver uh well i've got you are we seeing the same physical silver cruncher in australia i know you said you were well placed but i assume that means you've got lots of feedstock ready to refine and get into bars to meet physical demand yeah no we're we're in a great we're in a good spot for that and also abc william does have um you know with the ability to supply silver from uh from mints such as the royal canadian men's and the romans and so on and and ran so you know we have metal from multiple supplies but i think the important thing is is that we have a tremendous amount of silver that actually goes through abc refinery because abc refinery makes the bars um that don't get delivered to abc volume so yeah you know we are hearing that there is you know premiums are higher elsewhere in other territories and the availability of metal has been um constrained as you know there's there's been a rush for for retail bars and so on excellent well that is an excellent position to be in uh nick i believe i've taken up more of your time that i said i was going to so thank you very much for uh joining me i absolutely loved your technical explanation of the price movement and hopefully everybody was able to learn a couple of new phrases there and a new technical method uh and also too i really appreciate your insights on uh platinum and the gamma trade that you were part of or over a decade ago well thank you thank you very much for having me it's a real pleasure to be interviewed by you oh thanks zeke i'll speak to you later all right susan thank you

2021-03-01 00:49

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