Pick up a platinum ring and a gold ring of the same size, and the platinum one sits heavier in your hand. That weight is the first thing people notice when they bring a parent’s jewelry box to our Oakland Park office, and it is a good place to start. Platinum is denser than gold, it is mined in far smaller quantities, and it costs more per ounce than most beginners want to spend. That price tag keeps a lot of first-time buyers out. It also explains why the people who do hold it tend to hold it for a long while.
Like gold and silver, platinum is bought as a store of value. The price moves, sometimes sharply, but the amount of platinum on Earth is fixed and the yearly output is a fraction of what the gold mines produce. Scarcity does part of the work. Industry does the rest.
Most of that industrial demand comes from cars. Platinum is the working ingredient in catalytic converters, the part under the vehicle that scrubs exhaust before it leaves the tailpipe. When automakers build more cars, they buy more platinum, and the price follows. The catch: some manufacturers in the United States and Japan now lean on recycled converters or swap in palladium, a cousin metal that is usually cheaper. Those choices show up in the price too.
Jewelry is still the biggest single use, which is why so much platinum turns up in estates. Look for a small Pt or 950 stamp inside a band; that mark means platinum, not white gold. Refineries, chemical plants, and computer makers take their share as well.
One more thing worth knowing. Nearly all of the world’s platinum comes out of the ground in South Africa and Russia. A strike, a sanction, or a producer deciding to hold back supply can jolt the price with no warning.
So: expensive to get into, rare, tied to real factories and real mines, and easy to underestimate when it is sitting in a drawer. If you have inherited platinum, it deserves a proper look before you decide what to do with it.