Platinum is drawing investment as a financial asset and palladium boasts an enviable market balance but silver could top the precious pack this year as its latest fall offers a chance to buy, GFMS's Philip Klapwijk said. The managing director of the metals consultancy, which on Thursday released its 2010 Platinum and Palladium market survey, said that once the current price decline from last week's record above $49 an ounce has petered out, silver has enough favour among investors to return to these levels.
"If we see silver drop, perhaps down close to $30-mark then, (it) would look a pretty decent buy, because through to the end of the year, you've got the possibility of 40 to 50-percent price gains," Klapwijk said in an interview with Reuters.
"I'm not sure that silver would get above $50 but would we see it in the upper $40's again? Quite possibly. I don't see that scale of increase probably out there for gold and for platinum and probably not for palladium either," he said.
The silver price, which is still up about 22 percent so far this year at $38 an ounce, is set for its largest weekly decline in nearly 30 years, led by selling after a series of sharp rises in margin requirements to hold US silver futures, as well as hefty outflows of metal from the world's largest exchange-traded funds.
Gold, which hit a record $1,575.79 an ounce on Monday, is up only 6.5 percent this year, while platinum has risen by 1.7 percent to around $1,885 an ounce. Palladium, which virtually doubled in price last year, has lost nearly 8 percent to trade around $728.25, its lowest in nearly two months. GFMS expects platinum to show a seventh consecutive annual surplus in 2011 as jewellery demand softens.
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