Platinum hits 7-week high; gold firms on dollar, oil

By Atul Prakash

LONDON (Reuters) - Platinum jumped 4 percent to a seven-week high on Friday on investor buying ahead of the launch of platinum exchange-traded notes (ETNs), while gold hit a one-week peak on a weaker dollar and record high oil prices.

Investment bank UBS will soon launch two ETNs offering long and short trading strategies in platinum. ETNs, unlike exchange-traded funds, do not purchase physical platinum to back the number of shares sold.

According to CNBC television and NYSE Euronext exchange data, the two ETNs -- UBS E-Tracs Long Platinum ETN <PTM.P and UBS E-Tracs Short Platinum ETN -- will begin trading soon on the NYSE Arca platform.

"It won't have an impact on the availability of physical metal nor on lease rates," said Tom Kendall, metals strategist at Mitsubishi Corporation.

But he added that it offers another route by which U.S. mutual and pension funds, which cannot directly invest in commodity derivatives, can gain exposure to platinum.

"Fundamentally you cannot justify the kind of price move we have seen so far today. Gold and silver seem to have stalled ahead of the U.S. market open and sentiment there will have big influence on platinum," he added.

Spot platinum rose as high as $2,095 an ounce and was at $2,087.50/2,107.50 at 6:32 a.m. EDT, against $2,008.50/2,028.50 in New York late on Thursday.

Dealers also reported platinum purchases in Japan, Europe and the United States as auto makers stocked up for their second-quarter requirements, but the metal was still more than $200 below a lifetime high of $2,290 an ounce hit on March 4.  Continued...