Gold continues to know no bounds. In our first edition of the Precious Metals Report 2024, published in April 2024, we reported that gold had reached a new record high of US$2,200 per ounce, which would have been completely unthinkable just one year earlier. A good six months later, when we updated the Precious Metals Report 2024, the price of gold was up again by almost 20% to more than US$2,600 per ounce, and by the end of March 2025, when the Precious Metals Report 2025 was published, gold had exceeded the US$3,100 per ounce mark. But that was not all. The price of gold continued to rise to more than US$4,350 in October 2025, reaching new all-time highs almost daily (13 times in the third quarter of 2025 alone).
The gold price is currently in a sideways phase, but for how long? Many large banks and investment houses have recently raised their gold price forecasts. JP Morgan, for example, now expects the price of gold to reach US$6,000 per ounce by 2029. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently went a step further, saying that in the current environment, the price of gold could rise to US$5,000 or even US$10,000.
In principle, the same applies to silver as to gold: an all-time high was reached in October 2025, but there is still plenty of room for growth. However, compared to gold, this is mainly due to fundamental reasons, which for the seventh year in a row are based on a much higher demand for silver that supply cannot even come close to meeting. According to the latest calculations by the Silver Institute, there was a cumulative supply deficit of around 1,197 million ounces of silver on the silver market between 2019 and 2025. By way of comparison, 1,015 million ounces of silver were mined or recycled in 2024. There is currently no end in sight to this supply deficit, which means that the supply/demand gap can only be closed by a higher price.
Platinum is used almost exclusively in catalytic converters for diesel engines, but production of these has declined sharply in recent years, causing demand for platinum to fall and putting significant pressure on the price of platinum. This led some producers to drastically reduce their production or close entire mines.
However, the biggest problem recently has been in South Africa, the world's largest platinum producer. South Africa has been struggling for months with weather-related operational disruptions, power outages, and water shortages, which have depressed production volumes. At the same time, platinum recycling is too low to offset the resulting supply deficit, which is mainly driven by rising demand from the investment sector. The World Platinum Investment Council therefore expects a significant physical deficit in 2025. The price has already reacted and shot up accordingly.
Like platinum, palladium is also used primarily in catalytic converters for combustion engines, but in gasoline-powered vehicles. Here, too, production has been declining for years, especially in South Africa and Russia, where geopolitical tensions and structural challenges in mining are causing supply to become increasingly scarce.
In any case, a further slump in supply is to be expected for both platinum and palladium in the coming years, as South African mines in particular will not be able to maintain their production at the usual level – neither in terms of price nor technology, and quite independently of rising prices.
For investors, this presents an excellent opportunity to enter the world of precious metals.
