| Account | Shares | Price | Value | % of acct | Cost/sh | Gain $ | Gain % | Target |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 401K | 658 | $25.42 | $16,726 | 0.68% | $22.90 | $1,655 | +11.0% | — |
| RLT | 65 | $25.42 | $1,652 | 0.10% | $29.06 | $-237 | -12.5% | — |
| Total | 723 | $18,379 | 0.41% | $1,419 | +8.4% | 0.75% |
In short: Cited by back-reference as the worked example of the shortage that decides the chart — the standing Buy is reaffirmed, but no new call is made here. The commodity index's 2026 high is read as continuation rather than a double-top for a physical reason, not a technical one: "given the lengthy list of critical commodities in extremely short supply, and factoring in rising demand, we would argue for the latter interpretation. Palladium is a salient example of this condition, as we described in our August 21st, Pick of the Week." That note (Aug-21 POW!) reiterated PALL as a Buy on a 14-consecutive-year supply deficit, the mid-2026 closure of Lac des Iles, recycling down ~700koz on a record-old US vehicle fleet, PHEV demand the consensus mis-modelled, and a metal ~⅓ below its January-2026 apex of just over $2,000/oz — with the physically-backed ETF chosen for having no counterparty risk. Here the name is used as evidence for the index-level thesis; no price target, sizing or fresh recommendation is issued in this post, and the general hard-asset guidance ("timely profit-taking suggestions on spikes, and buy-up guidance on weakness") is framed at the asset-class level, not at PALL.
PALL is a fund that does one thing: it buys palladium bars and stores them in a vault. There is no mine, no management team, no debt, no earnings — a share of the fund is a claim on a specific quantity of metal. That structure is the reason Hay chose it in the first place. When you own the metal itself rather than a contract or a company, there is no counterparty who can fail to deliver.
In this note palladium is not a new recommendation. It appears as the example that settles an argument about a chart. Hay is looking at a broad commodity index that has just returned to the same high it made in 2022, and asking whether that is a ceiling — a "double top," where a market fails twice at the same level and rolls over — or the pause before the next leg up. He answers it, notably, without appealing to the chart at all: he says the shortages are real this time, and points at palladium as the clearest case, referring back to his detailed Buy note of August 21st.
What makes palladium that case is the gap between what the world assumed and what actually happened. Palladium goes almost entirely into catalytic converters — the device that cleans a petrol engine's exhaust. The market decided years ago that electric cars would kill that demand quickly, and priced the metal accordingly. Instead the growth came in plug-in hybrids, which still have a full petrol engine and a converter, and often use more palladium than a conventional car. Meanwhile supply has run short of demand for fourteen consecutive years, a major Canadian mine shut in mid-2026, and recycling — which supplies roughly a tenth of the market — fell sharply as Americans held onto ageing cars instead of scrapping them.
The price, meanwhile, is about a third below its January 2026 peak of just over $2,000 an ounce. That combination — a genuine, persistent physical deficit alongside a large price decline — is exactly the "critical commodity in extremely short supply" the note's argument needs, which is why it is cited here.
One caution on reading this page: no fresh call is made in this post. There is no new target, no sizing instruction, nothing to act on beyond the standing view. The general guidance he does give is at the asset-class level — take profits into spikes, add on weakness, across both commodities and the companies that produce them — and he names no producers at all.
In short: The physical-palladium vehicle for the metal he is now moving his entry forward on: "I think I may need to get long sooner than I thought" — a trade idea first floated the previous day, pulled forward by what "the market action could be telling us." The case is supply concentration plus an unpriced tail: "Comes down to Russia on the supply side at ~40% of global supply… the most under-appreciated geopolitical risk on the chessboard right now — None of this is in commodity prices right here." (He names the metal, not this ETF.)
Palladium is a precious metal used mostly in catalytic converters — the part of a petrol car's exhaust that scrubs pollution. PALL is a fund that simply holds bars of the metal in a vault, so owning it is close to owning palladium itself rather than owning a mining company.
Paulo's argument has nothing to do with cars. It is about where the metal comes from: roughly 40% of the world's palladium supply is Russian. That makes palladium the purest way to own the risk that something goes wrong with Russia, because a supply interruption there removes a large slice of the world's annual output and there is no quick substitute.
He thinks that risk is unusually live right now — Russian elections on 18-20 September, more noise around NATO flights, and what he calls Russian "hybrid warfare" (the drones over Leipzig, diplomatic flare-ups) — and, crucially, that none of it is showing up in commodity prices. When a market is charging you nothing for a risk you think is real, the cheapest thing to do is buy the thing that would move most if the risk arrives. That is why he says he "may need to get long sooner" than the plan he sketched the day before.
Two honest caveats. He calls this a trade idea, not a core holding — no size, no price level, and hedged with "may." And he names the metal, not this fund; PALL is the standard physical-palladium instrument used here to carry the view on the index, the same way PPLT carries his platinum exposure.
In short: The week's pick, and a reiteration rather than an initiation — "We are reiterating PALL as a Buy," restating "our original recommendation… of PALL, the palladium ETF, in April 2024," whose thesis "was contrarian and it has returned to out-of-favor status today." The trigger is a three-part alignment: "palladium has significantly corrected within what we believe is a long-term uptrend at the same time that the fundamental supply/demand story has strengthened," while "the macro backdrop underpinning the hard-asset thesis has moved further in our direction, particularly the trend toward monetary debasement." The entry is a 1/3 correction from the January 2026 apex of just over $2,000/ounce to ~$1,300 spot; the sell-side marker is a BofA Q4-2026 target of ~$2,200/oz, "implying ~70% upside from spot," with a base case "for flat to roughly a 23% gain." Macro: "we are entering what we believe is a new era of YCC… when central governments begin suppressing interest rates to manage sovereign debt costs (explicitly as Japan has done, implicitly as other OECD sovereigns are doing) the monetary debasement implications for real assets are profound" — with Bessent's "twist the yield curve" announcement having "ignited a roaring rally in the hard-asset space," read as "a definitive first step toward YCC." Palladium is "a special case" because it is both a quasi-monetary PGM asset and an industrially-deficit metal. Demand: "85-90% of global palladium demand is from automotive catalytic converters; ICE and hybrid vehicles require palladium; 'pure' BEVs do not," and the consensus wrongly "assumed the internal combustion engine-to-EV transition would be binary and swift" — instead PHEVs became "the dominant growth segment," using palladium "at rates comparable to conventional gasoline vehicles. Actually, they often consume more." Evidence: Chinese NEVs past 60% of monthly sales in 2026, BYD's PHEV export mix 11.6% → over 37%, Chinese PHEV exports to Europe +700% YoY, driven by range anxiety, an EU anti-subsidy tariff that exempts PHEVs, and DM 5.0-class range; accelerated by the Iran War and by Tesla owners switching ("21% TSLA owners are trading in their 'Musk-mobiles' for hybrids"). Supply: "a persistent deficit for 14 consecutive years" — 0.9Moz (2023), 0.5Moz (2024) — the expected 2026 surplus "repeatedly pushed back," Lac des Iles ceasing production mid-2026 (one of the few non-Russian/non-South-African sources), recycling down ~700,000 oz between 2022 and 2024 (~10% of total supply) as the US fleet aged to a record 12.6 years, and Nornickel ~40% + South Africa ~35% of primary supply with a sanctions tail ("Montana lawmakers are actively pushing the White House for harsher restrictions… an acute supply shock not remotely priced into the current $1,300 spot price"). Technically, Pd "has held around its initial breakout point," is still "well below its 200-day moving average," but "the steep downtrend… has been broken" — and the sell-off "tends to drive out the hot money." Risks argued: the $3,430 March-2022 peak then a ~70% collapse ("third-degree burned"), European ICE bans in the 2030s (doubted — "ICEs still represent around 95% of the existing global vehicle fleet"), and platinum substitution, "limited" at the current Pd/Pt ratio of ~0.70×. Verdict: "We're adding to the position… PALL, the physically backed ETF, has no counterparty risk, and is a convenient way to hold this key metal… We are reiterating PALL as a Buy."
PALL is not a company. It is a fund that does one thing: it buys physical palladium bars, stores them in a vault, and issues shares against them. Buy a share and you effectively own a slice of metal in a vault — no mine to run, no management to trust, no debt. Hay's phrase for the appeal is "no counterparty risk": there is nobody who has to stay solvent or honest for you to still own your palladium.
Palladium is a silvery metal used overwhelmingly for one job. Between 85% and 90% of the world's demand comes from catalytic converters — the box in a car's exhaust that turns poisonous gases into harmless ones. A petrol car needs one. A hybrid needs one. A pure battery-electric car has no exhaust, so it needs none. That single fact is why the market abandoned palladium: everyone concluded that electric cars would replace petrol cars quickly, so demand for the metal would collapse.
Hay's argument is that the market got the shape of the transition wrong. What is actually growing fastest is not the pure electric car but the plug-in hybrid — a car with both a battery you charge from a socket and a normal petrol engine. Those cars have full catalytic converters, and because their engine runs in short cold bursts rather than continuously, they often need MORE palladium than an ordinary petrol car, not less. And the confusion is baked into the data everyone reads: most published "EV sales" figures lump plug-in hybrids in with pure electrics, so the number that looks like the death of palladium is partly the growth of palladium.
The evidence is Chinese. More than 60% of monthly car sales in China in 2026 are now non-petrol vehicles, led by plug-in hybrids, with BYD at the centre. BYD's exports have shifted from 11.6% plug-in hybrids to over 37%. Chinese plug-in hybrid exports to Europe grew more than 700% in a year. Three reasons: buyers in places without much charging infrastructure want a petrol engine as backup; the EU put anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese pure-electric cars but exempted plug-in hybrids, making the hybrid the cheap option; and the newest platforms go over 1,200 miles on a combined tank and charge. Two extras push the same way — the Iran war has made petrol expensive and grids unreliable, which favours a car that can run on either, and the Financial Times reports that 21% of Tesla owners trading in are switching to hybrids.
Now the supply side, which Hay says almost nobody is looking at. The world has used more palladium than it produced for fourteen years running — a 0.9-million-ounce shortfall in 2023 and 0.5 million in 2024. The surplus forecasters keep promising keeps being pushed back. A significant Canadian mine (Lac des Iles) shut down in mid-2026, and it happened to be one of the few sources outside Russia and South Africa. Recycling, which normally acts as a shock absorber, is shrinking rather than growing: Americans are keeping cars a record 12.6 years on average instead of scrapping them, so roughly 700,000 ounces a year of recycled metal — about a tenth of total supply — has simply stopped appearing. And of what is mined, Russia's Nornickel produces about 40% and South Africa about 35%. Sanctions have so far spared palladium because carmakers lobbied for the exemption, but Montana politicians are pushing to end it. If that happened, the price would gap — and at today's roughly $1,300 an ounce, none of that possibility is priced in.
The macro layer sits on top. Governments with too much debt eventually stop letting interest rates rise, because they cannot afford the interest — Japan does this openly, others quietly. Hay believes America has just taken its first public step down that road: Treasury Secretary Bessent announced a plan to "twist the yield curve," selling short-term government debt to buy long-term debt, which pushes long-term borrowing costs down. When money is deliberately made cheaper than it should be, the currency loses value and physical things gain it. That is why hard assets rallied on the announcement. Palladium is unusual in being two things at once: a precious metal in the platinum family, which benefits from that money-printing logic, and an industrial metal with its own shortage.
He argues the other side properly. Palladium hit $3,430 in March 2022 and then fell about 70%, so anyone who bought the last story got hurt badly. Europe has legislated bans on petrol engines in the 2030s, though he doubts they will stick given that petrol cars are still about 95% of all vehicles on the road. And carmakers can substitute platinum for palladium in a converter when palladium gets expensive — they have done it before. Right now palladium costs about 0.70 times what platinum does, which is cheap enough that no one bothers switching, though a big rally would revive the risk.
The entry logic is simple and repeatable. The metal roughly doubled in 2025, then fell by a third from its early-2026 peak of just over $2,000 an ounce — a fall he attributes to momentum traders being flushed out rather than to anything breaking. The chart supports him partially: the price has held the level from which it originally broke out, and the year-long downtrend has ended, though it is still below its one-year average price. Bank of America has a $2,200 target for late 2026, about 70% above today's price, with a more conservative case of flat to +23%. His verdict: same setup as 2024, cheaper price, better fundamentals — "we're adding to the position," and PALL is reiterated as a Buy.
In short: Used as the visual of the PGM bull: a "very classic rounding bottom" — three tries at a level, breakout, consolidation, "poised to move higher," moving average turning up. PGMs "had a really good year… 2025" and he thinks they "continue higher."
PALL simply holds physical palladium, one of the platinum-group metals (used in catalytic converters and electronics). Polomny uses its chart to illustrate the bull case: a long "rounding bottom" where the price tested a ceiling three times, finally broke through, paused, and now looks set to climb. He thinks platinum-group metals, after a strong 2025, keep heading higher.
8:34It looks like — would you go long this chart or sell it short? This is kind of a bullish chart. I just throw this up here — it's easy to say, well, we're in a PGM bull market, but what does that really look like? This is a very classic rounding bottom — three times trying to get through this one level and then breaks through, consolidates, and then looks poised to move higher.
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Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.