Money Week Cover Story (Issue 893) 27th April 2018
Gold is a long-term store of value. Silver is it's rather more capricious little sister. But what about the other precious metals?
The platinum-group metals have attracted increasing amounts of attention in recent years. Platinum itself it currently at a low ebb - it's used widely in catalytic converters for diesel vehicles, and so has been hammered in the fallout from Volkswagen's emissions - rigging scandal. An ounce of platinum now costs significantly less than an ounce of gold, a historically rare occurance. The next best-known platinum-group metal is probably palladium, which has had an excellent run, mostly for the same reasons that platinum has been struggling - palladium is used in non-diesel catalytic converters.
However, there's another, much rarer member of the platinum family that you might want to start paying attention to. Rhodium is a "new metal that not many people can have", says Lorena Baird of Baird & Co. Physical rhodium, which Baird sells in bars (an ounce costs about £1,750), "is incredibly popular with investors" she says.
It's also hard to work with. You can write your name on a piece of silver with a hammer. To do the same on rhodium, Baird & Co. uses a machine that applies pressure equivalent to the force of two elephants standing on top of you. Yet while rhodiu is hard, it is also brittle - if you drop it, it breaks. Thats why rhodium typically isn't used to make jewellery. However, it is resistant to tarnishing, and so it is used to plate other metals, such as silver.
These are not monetary metals
One thing to remember when you are considering investing in precious metals is the distinction between industrial and monetary metals. Platinum and its fellow metals are not monetary metals - they are not typically viewed as reliable stores of value. Instead, they are much more correlated with industrial demand. As far as rhodium goes, about 80% of the metal is snapped up by the car industry, where - as with palladium and platinum - it is used in the manufacturing of catalytic coverters. Other areas where rhodium is used are glass-making (due to its resistance to heat), and electronic, where it's employed to make electrical contacts.