Palladium Has Quietly Rallied While Gold and Silver Takeover the Headlines

A 47.3% wipeout in five months, a brief rebound, then another slide: that’s palladium’s 2026 so far. While gold sits above $4,000 and silver trades around $60, this is the precious metal still trying to hold a comeback.

Gold and silver have spent October trading near the center of the precious-metals conversation. Palladium has had a far messier year. The metal used mostly to scrub pollutants out of gasoline engine exhaust crashed from a January 2026 high of $2,195.50 an ounce to $1,156 by June 24, a 47.3% wipeout, according to data compiled by Barchart. It briefly rebounded into the $1,220 to $1,300 range in late September, but was back near $1,150 to $1,160 by Oct. 12, making Commerzbank’s $1,350 year-end forecast a rebound call rather than a continuation of a clean rally.

That is a very different picture from the “90% off the lows” framing floating around some corners of the metals press earlier this year. Measured from palladium’s brutal August 2024 trough of $813.50, the January 2026 spike did more than double. Measured from this year’s June bottom to recent prices near $1,150 to $1,160, the gain has largely vanished. The metal is not telling the record-breaking story gold and silver are telling right now.

What makes palladium worth a second look isn’t the size of the move. It’s that the two forces driving the 2026 debate, Russian supply risk and the electric vehicle transition, have both become messier than the simple bear case suggested.

In July 2025, Sibanye-Stillwater, which operates the only primary platinum-group-metals mine in the United States, in Montana, filed antidumping and countervailing duty petitions with the U.S. Department of Commerce against unwrought palladium from Russia, joined by the United Steelworkers union. The petition argued Russian palladium was flooding the U.S. market below fair value and threatening the viability of American supply. Commerce agreed, at least on paper: in April 2026 it set a final antidumping duty of 132.83% and a countervailing duty of 109.1% on Russian palladium.

Then, on May 29, 2026, the U.S. International Trade Commission killed the whole thing. The ITC ruled that Russian palladium imports had not caused material injury to the U.S. industry, which under American trade law means Commerce cannot issue the orders no matter what duty rate it calculated. No tariffs. Russian supply, overwhelmingly controlled by Norilsk Nickel, keeps flowing in at whatever price it has been flowing in at, and the feared supply shock that had partly driven the metal’s January spike toward $2,195 simply didn’t happen.

Bank of America is still betting on a bigger move than Commerzbank, projecting $2,200 an ounce by the fourth quarter of 2026. With the ITC having tossed out the Russian duty case, any bullish case now rests more heavily on physical supply and demand, not trade policy.

A market that can’t agree if it’s tight or loose

And on supply and demand, the analysts don’t even agree with each other. Metals Focus projects a 376,000-ounce global deficit for 2026, which would be the fifth consecutive year the market has run short. Norilsk Nickel’s own numbers tell a calmer story: industrial demand of 9.1 million ounces against supply of 9.4 million ounces, broadly balanced once you set aside roughly 300,000 ounces of expected investment stockpiling. Johnson Matthey, the refiner whose twice-yearly PGM reports are the industry’s closest thing to a scorecard, has said palladium and rhodium are more likely to run surpluses this year while platinum stays in deficit.

That disagreement matters because it’s the real reason palladium hasn’t followed gold and silver into record territory. A metal nobody can confidently call tight or loose doesn’t attract the kind of momentum money that’s been piling into gold on tariff fears and rate-cut bets. Palladium is stuck being priced on fundamentals that are themselves contested.

The demand side got a real, if underappreciated, tailwind in December 2025, when the European Union rolled back its plan to ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2035. Brussels replaced the outright ban with a 90% CO2 reduction target, which leaves room for combustion engines, and the catalytic converters that depend on palladium, to keep being built well past 2035. The policy reversal followed heavy lobbying from German and Italian automakers facing weak EV demand and cheaper Chinese competition. It’s a modest reprieve rather than a reversal of the long-term shift to EVs, but for a metal whose single biggest use is scrubbing gasoline exhaust, it’s one less reason for demand to fall off a cliff.

None of this makes palladium the trade of the year. Gold’s climb past $4,000 and silver’s move above $60 reflect a much bigger story: tariff threats from Donald Trump against China, shifting Federal Reserve rate expectations, and a flight to safe-haven assets that palladium, an industrial metal with no real safe-haven premium, doesn’t share. But a metal that fell 47% in five months, briefly clawed back part of that loss, then slid again while a dead trade case, a diluted EV mandate and conflicting market-balance forecasts reshaped the debate, is exactly the kind of story that gets skipped over when gold is making headlines every week.