Why platinum group metals have spent 18 of 22 January days above ELEVATED
Platinum group metals maintained elevated risk levels throughout January 2025, driven by persistent South African supply disruptions and geopolitical tensions.
The data
Of the 22 trading days in January 2025, our models classified Platinum Group, Palladium as ELEVATED or higher for 18 of them — an 82% hit rate on elevated risk that is unusual for this group. To put this in context, the average across all 12 minerals over the same period was 36%.
The sustained elevation was not driven by a single event. Instead, our pipeline detected a rolling series of geopolitical and supply-chain disruptions that compounded throughout the month: sanctions discussions affecting Russian palladium supply, South African load-shedding impacts on platinum refining, and escalating rhetoric around export controls in Zimbabwe.
Model performance
How did the models perform against reality? Of the 18 days classified as ELEVATED+, 14 saw realised volatility exceed our 1.5σ threshold — a precision rate of 78%. The 4 false positives all occurred in the final week of January as market attention shifted to US Federal Reserve communications, reducing the direct impact of PGM-specific signals on price action.
Importantly, the models correctly identified the two largest single-day moves of the month: palladium's 6.3% drop on January 14 (classified as HIGH the preceding day) and platinum's 4.1% gain on January 22 (classified as ELEVATED). Both days had alert flags set to true in the delivered dataset.
Signal architecture insights
The dominant risk factors throughout January were remarkably consistent for PGMs: production risk appeared as a top-3 factor in 85% of elevated predictions, followed by geographic spread (72%) and news volume acceleration (68%). This pattern suggests the models were correctly identifying a structural supply-side theme rather than responding to noise.
Cross-mineral contagion also played a meaningful role. Our contagion feature, which measures the correlation of risk signals between related minerals, showed platinum and palladium signals leading rhodium signals by approximately 1-2 trading days. This lag pattern is consistent with the physical supply chain, where PGM production is inherently linked through shared mining operations.
Implications for February
As of February 1, the 7-day models for all three PGMs have returned to MODERATE, driven primarily by a reduction in news volume and a normalisation of geographic spread metrics. However, the 30-day models remain at ELEVATED for palladium, suggesting that while the immediate crisis intensity has eased, underlying structural risks have not fully dissipated.
Subscribers monitoring the 30-day horizon for portfolio risk management should note that palladium's 30-day model has now been continuously at ELEVATED or above for 45 consecutive days — the longest such streak in our 14-month training period.