Revving up with rhodium
Why rhodium is on a roll
The technicalities of making auto catalysts explains a lot about platinum group metals, writes Robert Laing
Not only did platinum suffer the ignominy of its price falling below gold a few years back, in September its price was overtaken by palladium. At the time of writing, palladium trades at US$1,005.40/oz while platinum trades for $924.80/oz. Gold is at about $1,280/oz. A strange side-effect of platinum getting cheaper than palladium is it caused the price of sister platinum group metal (PGM), rhodium, to rocket. Punters blessed with 20/20 hindsight could have tripled their money by buying rhodium in January and selling it in October. Considering all three PGMs come from the same mines and are mainly bought by vehicle manufacturers in countries which require catalytic converters to clean exhaust fumes, why do their prices not move in lockstep?
While manufacturers have some flexibility over which PGMs they use, the mines have little control over the ratio that comes out of the ground. The output of SA platinum mines is about 60% platinum, 30% palladium and 10% rhodium, according t...
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