Things that surprised fivemack

[fivemack]

Should I be more surprised that you can buy light-weight hiking mugs made out of titanium, or that there are two sellers on Amazon of mugs branded as 'titanium' with the first entry in their description reading 'made out of porcelain' ? 'Titanium' appears to be a marketing term meaning 'shiny and slightly brown'.

There appears to be a gap in the market for people who want cutlery made of titanium (because who would not want a titanium spoon?) which isn't irredeemably ugly.

Comments

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

That reminds me, I was going to look at unusual rare metals for investment purposes ..

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

[admires the one gadolinium piece he has under his monitor; the encapsulation isn't terribly good and it's covered with white crystals]

It's clearly too late for the heavy-rare-earths trade, China's already announced substantial export restrictions and I suspect the prices are speculatively enormous.

I'd have thought palladium was the obvious candidate, it's about the oddest metal that's traded and it has substantial chemical use. It's already bouncing up after a bubble in 2000, but I'm not sure how to get hold of it in decent bulk: buying a futures contract and insist on physical delivery might work, but a futures contract is for 100 troy ounces at £260 per ounce.

A lot cheaper than Aldrich's £250 per 4.8 grams of 0.5mm Pd wire - I imagine you might be able to borrow money to buy it and then pay the interest by selling off scraps to the chemistry department, though that requires owning tools for manipulating palladium - but not a very convenient scale to invest on.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

I was thinking less rare than rhenium but less common than gold, which is already at a high. Apparently you can buy palladium in coin and bullion form quite easily. There are some complicated rules on VAT which obviously need to be worked around when investing; I think the way forwards is to visit a dealer in this stuff.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

For pure abundance-against-cost reasons I would have thought tellurium, which costs a few hundred dollars a kilo and has ludicrously low cosmic abundance, could be a decent investment. Though storing it would be hard, it's toxic and reasonably volatile.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Rhenium looks to be coming off a bubble, and around £4000 per kilo; but again it'd be hard to get hold of and hard to sell on.