Remember when everyone thought silver was going to the moon forever?
I do. For most of 2024 and 2025 the story was simple: massive physical deficit, Reddit crowd still in the game, LBMA stocks collapsing, backwardation screaming “delivery problem.” It felt unstoppable. And then, almost overnight, one of the sharpest commodity teams on the Street looked at the same data and said… “actually, we think the party is over – and the next one is somewhere else entirely.”
That somewhere else? Platinum and palladium.
The Big Call: Silver Squeeze Is Done, Platinum Is Next
Senior commodity strategist Dan Ghali at TD Securities just put out the most contrarian precious-metals note I’ve read in years. While most of us were still high-fiving over silver’s run past $35, his team declared the squeeze structurally finished and shifted their top commodity picks for 2026 to the forgotten platinum group metals (PGMs).
Their reasoning is surprisingly straightforward once you dig into it, and it basically boils down to three years of manic price action into two very different stories: one metal that ran too far too fast, and two others that have been quietly setting up for a supply crunch nobody is talking about.
First, the uncomfortable truth about silver
Let’s start with what actually happened in London.
Over the last eighteen months the LBMA vault system went from critically low stocks to the lowest drawdown most veterans had ever seen to adding a staggering 212 million ounces of “free-floating” silver in essentially one giant wave. That is not a rounding error. That is the biggest inventory rebuild in modern history for the white metal.
Where did it come from? Private vault liquidations, scrap finally responding to $30+, and a mountain of metal that had been tied up in ETFs and industrial vaults suddenly becoming available when prices made it worth the hassle to move.
“Heading into 2026 we are seeing an epic-scaled silver flood – the single largest wave of inventory repletion on record.”
Senior commodity strategist
Prices are still elevated, sure. But the team argues the remaining premium is now almost entirely a liquidity phenomenon – backwardation costs, short-dated option skew, CTA trend models – rather than genuine physical scarcity. In plain English: the shorts can keep rolling and paying the carry for a while longer if they want to wait it out.
That doesn’t mean silver crashes tomorrow. It just means the “guaranteed squeeze higher because there is no metal left” story is, in their view, broken. Expect a grinding trading range with a ceiling somewhere in the mid-$40s once volatility normalizes.
Honestly? That take hurts a little if you’ve been long silver forever (guilty). But the data is hard to argue with when you look at the vault reports month after month.
Now flip the page to platinum and palladium
Here’s where things get really interesting.
Consensus has been pounding the table on “PGMs are dead” for years. Electric vehicles, thriftier catalysts, substitution, scrap tsunami – you know the narrative. And for a while it looked bullet-proof: prices collapsed, miners slashed capex, South Africa and Russia kept pumping anyway because they could.
But TD’s models are spitting out a very different picture for 2026–2028, and it rests on three pillars most people have completely misjudged.
- Automotive demand is not collapsing – it’s quietly re-accelerating in ways almost nobody is modeling correctly.
- Scrap supply is going to stay astonishingly tight for years longer than the street expects.
- Mine supply has been gutted by a decade of under-investment and is structurally incapable of responding even if prices double.
Pillar 1: The hidden boom in vehicle ownership
Everyone focuses on “vehicles sold this year” numbers. TD focuses on vehicle density per household – and the data out of North America is wild if you haven’t looked lately.
De-urbanization trends, work-from-home permanence, and plain old affordability math have pushed the average U.S. household fleet size higher every single year since 2021. Their proprietary survey work shows continued growth through at least 2028.
Why does this matter so much? Because a mere 2 percentage-point change in annual density growth flips 400,000 oz of platinum demand and a staggering 1.7 million oz of palladium demand. That is multiple percentage points of global supply swinging on what most models treat as noise.
Add in stubbornly low dealer inventories (still near record lows in many regions) and you have the ingredients for a classic auto-production surprise to the upside – exactly the kind of thing that blindsides consensus forecasts.
Pillar 2: The scrap myth
Every bear presentation for the last three years has a slide titled “Scrap Recovery Will Save Us.” TD’s answer? Not until 2027 at the earliest, and even then only gradually.
Catalytic converters last a lot longer than people think when gasoline prices are high and drivers keep cars longer. Regional collection networks in North America and Europe are saturated – there just isn’t that much more easy metal to pull out of junkyards. Russian and South African flows remain politically constrained.
Result? Secondary supply stays flat to down for years while primary supply continues to shrink.
Pillar 3: Mining supply is broken for a generation
Capex in the PGM sector was obliterated between 2015–2023. Projects take 7–10 years from discovery to production in the best cases, and almost nothing got sanctioned when prices were sub-$900 platinum.
Even if prices went to $2,000 tomorrow, the industry literally aren’t enough late-stage projects in the pipeline to materially increase supply before the end of the decade. That’s not opinion – that’s pipeline math.
The wildcard nobody is pricing: tariffs and Section 232
Throw U.S. trade policy into the mix and things get spicy fast.
Section 232 investigations can (and probably will) put platinum and palladium on the tariff radar alongside steel and aluminum. Even if negotiated exemptions eventually appear, the 6–18 month window before implementation is classic speculative stockpiling territory – we literally watched the same movie with silver in 2021.
Palladium looks especially vulnerable here because Russia still accounts for roughly 40% of mine supply. Any whiff of sanctions risk and the forward curve will flip violently into backwardation.
Where does gold fit in all this?
TD hasn’t abandoned the yellow metal – far from it. They still see gold as the primary beneficiary of monetary stress, fiscal deterioration, and institutional portfolio diversification. Their base case has gold trading around $4,400 in early 2026 with upside risk if the dollar funding markets crack again.
But in terms of relative torque, platinum and palladium screen as the better risk/reward setups for the next 12–24 months.
So is platinum really the “next silver squeeze”?
Not exactly the same – the market is smaller, more institutional, less retail-driven. But the ingredients are scarily similar:
- Years of under-investment ✓
- Structural demand most people think is dying but isn’t ✓
- Supply response lag measured in years, not months ✓
- Potential geopolitical/trade catalyst ✓
- Current positioning and sentiment at multi-year lows ✓
Perhaps the most telling signal? Lease rates for both metals have started creeping higher and forward curves are flattening. Those are usually the first whispers before the real move starts.
Look, nobody is saying buy platinum calls and quit your day job. But when one of the most respected commodity desks on the planet puts out a note saying their top picks for 2026 are 20% above current consensus… you pay attention.
Silver had an amazing run. Maybe it’s time to let the other kid have the spotlight for a while.
Disclosure: The author holds physical gold and silver and has no current position in platinum or palladium, but is actively researching adding exposure before year-end.
