Thursday, February 4, 2010

Precious Metals: Long Upward Climb

Precious Metals

It may surprise some that over the last 10 years the best performing asset class has been precious metals, and they still have a long run before them before they reach the height of their performance.

Just think of the most well known and popular precious metals: gold and silver. Even though they've been all over the financial news over the last couple of years, and gold especially has had a tremendous run, they aren't even close to running out of steam, and should perform strongly for years into the future.

Or think of much lesser known precious metals like platinum and palladium, which are driven primarily by the automotive industry. Recent exposure to those metals have grown because of the popularity of a recently launched exchange-traded offering. And that's at a time when the automotive industry is way down.

Copper has been doing well too in spite of the general collapse of the housing market. What's going to happen when that regains some traction.

The same with iron ore in China, which is now scrambling and wheeling and dealing in attempts to keep the prices of iron ore down in the face of growing domestic demand.

The precious metal story won't mature until the China story matures, and their rate of growth should continue on for at least a decade, which is also the time frame looked upon by commodity experts when precious metals and other commodities mature as well.

Either way, precious metals have a lot of legs left, and they're only in the middle of the historic bull commodity market.

Precious Metals

No comments: