About Buying Platinum From Dealers
Platinum is a precious metal that you can buy on paper in the commodities market, or you can buy it in person from platinum dealers. However you buy platinum, there's no doubt that you can benefit from having it in your investment portfolio.
Investment advisers often recommend that you dedicate 9.5% of your portfolio in so-called hard assets, which includes precious metals like platinum, gold, and silver. Like gold, platinum can cushion your portfolio from inflation and the fluctuations in stock prices.
Platinum has intrinsic value, meaning that it has industrial uses, especially in the car industry where it is used for making diesel autocatalyst. Unlike gold, however, it can quickly change prices depending on the demand by the auto industry, and its accompanying supply (it is rarer than gold and silver). If you are a trader, you can definitely take advantage of this characteristic of platinum as a traded commodity.
However, if you want to secure your portfolio, you need to buy hard platinum. Your best option is to buy platinum bars because you can get the lowest-priced per-troy ounce that way.
Like gold bars, you need to buy your platinum from a reputable platinum dealers – there are many counterfeiters out there, and you definitely don't want to become a victim. A standard platinum bar is made of 10 troy ounces of this precious metal, at a purity of 0.9995. You can trade it, or have the dealer store it for you, or you could have it delivered to you.
Aside from bars, you could also buy platinum coins. They come with the same purity as the bars when you buy them from a reputable dealer, but only in smaller sizes. There are two governments that mint these coins – the Canadian and the US government and they are treated as legal tender and are valued at the amount stamped on them.