Stock Market, Gold, & Silver All Coast into Year End

Gold and silver traded quietly and mostly sideways during this holiday-shortened week – with all markets lacking a clear direction heading into the end of the year.

That said, the stock market finally seems to be cooling off amid some weak economic numbers coming in the door. We've seen downward revisions of the government's economic data from recent months. Also, there has been unexpectedly persistent inflation numbers, increasing war drums, and some general uncertainty about what policy changes will come from the new Administration.

For the week gold is down by a very slight 0.3% to come in at $2,628 an ounce. With just a few trading days left in the year, gold – while it may be off of its all-time highs from a couple of months ago – is still showing a robust gain of 27% in 2024.

Turning to silver, the white metal is off about 20 cents or 0.7% on the week to come in at $29.55 an ounce. Like gold, silver has pulled back over the last 8 to 10 weeks, but is still showing a yearly gain of more than $5 or 21% with just a couple of days to go before we turn the calendar to 2025.

The Platinum Group Metals have not had such a good year. Platinum is down almost 6% year-to-date to come in at $934, but palladium has been the big loser in 2024 among the precious metals. The industrial metal is down almost $300 an ounce or 23% since the end of last year, and currently comes in at $950. After trading for a big premium to platinum for several years, and even gold for a few years there, platinum and palladium essentially reached parity earlier this year. The direction of the PGMs will be one of the trends we’ll be following both on this podcast and in our news articles at moneymetals.com in 2025.

Well even as investors and institutions in Europe and the U.S. remain largely disinterested in gold, we continue to see evidence of voracious buying coming from the East. In particular, our own Jan Nieuwenhuijs published a report this week at moneymetals.com regarding some massive – and secretive – purchases by the Chinese.

The mainstream financial press have totally overlooked what's happening, claiming Chinese gold purchases have been almost totally non-existent in recent months. But our research, based on import and export data, proves China has been stockpiling the yellow metal hand over fist, airlifting several dozen tonnes of gold out of London each and every month.

To be sure, the rest of the world has increasingly been turning to gold and silver for financial insurance. We believe our fellow citizens will eventually do so as well.

Be sure to check out our year-end production specials over at MoneyMetals.com where you'll find Walking Liberty silver rounds and 10 oz Money Metals silver bars both slashed to just $1.99 over spot – regardless of your order size. And there's a really interesting deal on some fractional gold coins where we reduced premiums by as much as 52% – thanks to some big inventory surpluses we have at the moment.

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