Gram-Sized Platinum Bars

Gold and silver are two of the most prominent physical investments that a person can make, or are they? Something that a lot of people neglect to acknowledge is the fact that platinum is arguably just as good or even better of an investment than gold and silver can be.

Just like gold and silver can come in a variety of different shapes and sizes, platinum can too. Amongst beginning or simply smaller investors, gram sized platinum bars are a must-have. You can make an investment as big or small as you would like because there are so many different sizes of gram platinum bars.

The purpose of this article is to explain the different sizes of platinum bars as well as the producers that make them available to the public. You may be thinking that there cannot possibly be a huge difference between similarly sized platinum bars produced by two different companies, and you are mostly correct, but the power of a brand name is just as prevalent in the precious metals industry as it is in any other.

Different Sizes

As is true with an investment in gold, it does not take a large physical amount of platinum for what you have purchased to be considered a larger investment. You can buy a one gram platinum bar and depending on the type of investor you are this can be seen as a fairly sized investment.

The smallest available platinum bar is the 1 gram platinum bar. These specific bars are incredibly small and for this reason they are always packaged in protective plastic case that typically bears the name of the mint which produced it. These bars are so minuscule that without the protective case they would be very easily lost or damaged.

Since these bars are encased in plastic, it goes without saying that they would do best to stay in that plastic. Because you cannot physically feel the platinum that you own, the case that your bar is protected within typically comes with assay, which is no more than a simple certification from the producing mint that the bar within the plastic is actually, in fact a platinum bar.

The next largest platinum bar is the 5 gram bar and though it is 5x as large as the 1 gram bar, it is still fairly small. 5 gram platinum bars are so small that they also typically come encased in plastic and with assay. Platinum bars found in gram sizes larger than 5 are rarer to find and seldom consumed. The same can be said about platinum bars smaller than 1 gram, because fractional sizes do exist.

A safe rule of thumb to go by is that if you find a platinum bar that weighs any amount of grams and it is not encased in plastic coupled with assay, you should likely stay away from that purchase. This is not to say that gram sized platinum bars that are not in assay all aren’t real, but they can be easily lost or damaged and it is a much safer alternative to simply purchase a bar with assay.

Different Producers

Since platinum is not as prominent of an investment option as gold and silver are, it comes as no surprise that there are significantly fewer mints who produce them. The two most prominent producers of gram sized platinum bars are Credit Suisse and PAMP Suisse. These companies are both from Switzerland and have long had their hand in the precious metals industry.

As you move into larger, ounce sizes, of platinum there becomes a wider variety of producers, but for now these two have a firm grasp on smaller sized bars.