By Jared Cummans

As 2012 nears its close, investors are beginning to look toward a new year, one that will hopefully be less volatile for the commodity world. The precious metals world, in particular, saw a fair amount of volatility throughout the past year as this elite group of four has rarely had a quiet period. With the approaching fiscal cliff and economic uncertainty fresh in the minds of many, predicting where these commodities will end up next year has become a hobby of analysts all across the market.

Citigroup (C) recently came out with its forecast for these four metals for the coming year, and Citi has some insights that investors may want to pay attention to prior to making allocations.

Gold To Gain…For Now

Gold's average price in 2012 fell at $1,679/oz, and Citi expects the yellow metal to add to that tally for

By Jared Cummans

As traders try to make their way through the volatile and often dangerous world of commodities, the futures curve is one of the most important aspects to focus on. Many traders look for contangoed curves to either make savvy trades or avoid potential blunders for their portfolio. Contango, the process by which near month futures are cheaper than those expiring further into the future, is often caused by storage costs of hard assets, but can also be a reflection of future price expectations. In this iteration of our contango report, we focus on three key metals for investors to keep an eye on.

Gold

There is almost never a time in which gold prices are not contangoed, as the market simply bets on this yellow metal to continually rise, as it has done for the last decade. For the time being, this precious metal is

I have already posted about the near paradigm shift in the precious metals market as gold sharply rose above Platinum. Let's reexamine the gap between gold and platinum and see if there was any change in the relation between these two metals.

The chart below shows the development of gold and platinum from August 2011 to March 2012. We can learn several things from this chart. At the beginning of August 2011, when the debate over raising the U.S debt ceiling was held and the S&P announced it will downgrade U.S.'s credit rating, gold picked off very promptly as many investors were seeking safe haven investments. Platinum, which is a precious metal, isn't used as safe haven investments such as gold, therefore it didn't rise following these said events occurred at the beginning of August.

(click to enlarge)

Following the sharp fall of both precious