Other Precious Metals To Look At?

To be a viable precious metal, it has to be, well, precious. That means valuable. Value is, as always, driven by supply and demand. A precious metal has to have sufficiently low supply that the demand for it is outweighed by the supply, or sufficiently high demand that the end-users are waiting to take every speck of the stuff that gets mined.

Copper, lead, iron, aluminium, tin and the other common "everyday" metals... even if they saw a surge in price, you'd need to physically own an inconveniently large mass of metal to see profits. Furthermore, they're all common enough that, if the price went up, we'd know where to go to find some more, fairly easily - which would increase supply and drive the price back down again.

Rarity alone does not make a metal "precious". Scandium is an extremely scarce, lightweight metal; it's properties are similar to aluminium. A little bit too similar, in fact; any industrial application that might conceivably use scandium could substitute aluminium instead or maybe titanium, which are both much cheaper and easier to obtain. Someone could make a "fake scandium ingot" out of aluminium and you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference without a chemical assay kit or XRF analyser. So there is zero demand for scandium - none, at all. So the price is low and will likely remain low unless someone discovers a magical new use for it.

One of the difficulties with considering non-conventional "precious metals" is that many of the candidates do not have one key physical property that all the traditional precious metals have: ease of conversion from one form into another. That means that a precious metal has to be either soft (so it can be pressed or hammered to a new shape) or have a low melting point (so it can be easily melted to be poured into moulds and cast). A metal that can't be easily reshaped has to be devalued, because it costs people money (labour, electricity, etc) to do the reshaping; the value of the finished artefact is not in the metal, but in the effort put into making it.

For example, tungsten is a terrible candidate for a "new precious metal". It has a melting point of 3422°C (6192 °F), way too high for economically viable melting, and it's darned hard, too. If you manage to make a "coin" or ingot out of tungsten, someone else would have a very difficult time in turning your ingot into some other shape; they'd have to dissolve it in acid and re-precipitate it. Jewellers make tungsten wedding rings, but they're generally worthless on resale as far as intrinsic value is concerned, because you can't easily make anything except another ring out of them.

Uranium would be an excellent candidate for a bullion metal, and there's already a ready-made industry in mining it. But people (and governments) seem to have the heebie-jeebies about private ownership of pieces of that particular element, for some reason.

The six metals of the platinum group - platinum, iridium, osmium, palladium, rhodium and ruthenium, are all scarce metals that occur naturally in much the same mineral deposits and they all have useful chemical and physical properties, creating demand for them. Two of these, platinum and palladium, are already considered "precious metals" and can readily be found in bullion form. Osmium stinks - quite literally, as it's oxides are volatile and poisonous - and ruthenium only slightly less so. Pure iridium is nearly as bad as tungsten, too hard and high-melting to be easily forged into coin or ingot form. That just leaves rhodium. Judging by the prices that these guys charge for "coins" made of different metals, rhodium is currently the most expensive metal on the planet capable of being crafted into bullion form.

Tungsten has nearly the same density and weight as gold..I remember about a year ago someone bought a gold bar that was gold plated tungsten and they very nearly got away with it. Activists began wondering how much tungsten is in Fort Knox.

Gold and silver, in particular, have unique properties making it hard to find a substitute that does everything they do; you'll find that if gold and silver were priced out of reach, different groups will choose different substitutes, depending on the properties they are most interested in. Need low electrical resistance? Try aluminium. Need a similar melting point? Try germanium. Need ductility? Consider plastics. Need shiny yellow metal? Try brass, or anodized titanium. Need all the properties of gold at once? Sorry, but there is no substitute - you'll have to pay whatever the ask for gold is, and make your customers pay extra.

Besides the inherent risks in gambling on what direction "future technologies" are likely to go, the problem with pinning your hopes on a metal with a value derived mostly from an industrial application is that you can't rely on the value being permanent. Such applications do come and go, as new technologies make old ones obsolete and new ethical standards make old practices unacceptable.

A hundred years ago, an "industrial speculator" might have advised you to buy up mercury - sure, it was liquid (literally), making storage and handling a little tricky, but it was being used for all sorts of things, with new applications for it being discovered all the time. Then the health and environmental problems associated with mercury caused governments to ban or restrict its use in most of those aforementioned applications. Mercury now has "negative value", like uranium - you have to pay people to take the stuff off your hands and dispose of it properly.

Two hundred years ago, the advice would have been, "Platinum!". It's value had risen quickly from negative (the Spanish had to refine the platinum out of the gold ore, then pay their miners to throw the stuff away) to literally worth its weight in gold to the scientists and chemical manufacturers who needed it. Then the Russians found a riverful of the stuff and flooded the market, just at the time when new discoveries and processes were making platinum less essential; the price collapsed and it wasn't until the Russian revolution cut off supply that its price began to rise again.

If you want an idea here is one: Tellurium. It is as rare on earth as Rhodium, but not as expensive due to historic lack of uses. The prices have started climbing in the last few years as everyone is "going green". It's used in making solar panels.
In the forseable future, prices should keep rising. But like Sap said, technology can change that.

Great posts Sap; Thanks so much!

Sap-

Those elemental coins are simply a novelty to separate fools from their money.

For starters, they're not "coins". They might be a novel way to display the elements, but that would be of little interest outside a science class.

$610 for 0.1 oz of Rhodium? When you can buy an entire oz for about four times that?

Then again, they want $320 an ounce for carbon, making for awfully expensive coal.

I forget the dates, but aluminum used to bring PM prices, more than gold, IIRC.

Yes, that is true. I remember reading about one of the kings of France setting a table for many guests where the highest ranking of them ate off of Al plates while the lesser of them ate off of Au plates. That was probably sometime in the early 1700s. The electrolytic process for Al production now produces many tons of Al metal each day and at relatively low cost, so in spite of its unusual physical properties, it is a cheap metal these days.