Catcons are the bulk use of Pt and Pd but not the only uses. Chemists use a lot (including the cold fusion wackos) for things like crucibles for iginitions, gas purifiers, and whatnot. Rhodium for one is used as an alloy with Pt to make it better mechanically for crucibles and other things. We have a hydrogen purifier that has a rather large amount of Pd in it in the form of a big "test tube" for hydrogen to diffuse through when it's heated. In fact, I just did a vacuum deposition of a few mg of Pd for a guy who wanted a membrane that would store and release tiny amounts of H in extremely pure condition.
Stuff like that tends to set a lower limit on demand, and is not a price sensitive use, really. If a guy is going to give me a few hundred bucks to have a couple milligrams of Pd put here just so - do I really care what the Pd cost me?
Wild swings usually mean a thin market in chemicals/elements. The stuff will build up at some producer who gets it as a byproduct, then someone will need a bit, make a phone call...and the odd trade happens. Most of the Pt group metals are found together and are produced more or less at the ratios of what's in the ore. I suspect some of this has never made it to the futures/options markets for hedging, it all being done person to person at this point.
Yes, silver
production can go up without the
net supply going up if the demand also goes up. Isn't most silver actually a byproduct of other metal extraction? Just asking since that's what I've seen in all my "rare metals" mining and extraction types of books. Things like lead, copper, zinc etc tend to have a little silver in the ore, and they get it back as things like anode slime when the former are refined electrolytically.
I'll have to check h4rdware's stuff and see if I can get it going in open office here (all linux at my shop now), but obviously - nice job man! I use
www.ino.com for a lot of things, a few are right on the front page, more under the "markets" menu there - futures, options, all that. Not super fast on some of the updates, but always there, and free. They don't use much fancy html.
My BS numbers above were just along the lines of well, what I do myself usually, and based on a kind of barbell approach - less of the highest beta ones, since you don't need as much of those to see a big gain or loss on one of those wild swings.
One way of looking at it is that a typical move in one holding ought to be normalized to the same dollar change. In the above sentence, it's the "ought" that is the questionable assumption. There could easily be reasons that's not ideal. The more high beta ones on the package, the less of the total perhaps ought to be high beta to keep the overall number reasonable?
If you pull up a year chart of Pd - it's a swing traders dream, mostly. We had one range last year to about September, then another lower one since about October. You could (and I did) reliably buy at/near the bottom of this range, and go ahead and sell or short near the top, repeat as necessary. Pretty much just bounced at every support and resistance level, very nice and easy to get right. The only times you get hammered doing that would be when the range shifts, as it did sept-oct. On average, you make money.
Speaking of rare (and I'll have to get pix when I get the stuff), friend Bill scored us a few Km of W/Re alloy wire for pennies on the dollar. Rhenium is one rare beast, used for awhile in tungsten heaters for vacuum tubes and light bulb filaments, as it makes the tungsten more ductile and less likely to "offset" and blow out at high temp, and less prone to the destructive water cycle.
It's also used in type C thermocouples (for power plants, nukes and other real hot stuff where type K would melt) that cost several bucks a foot for the alloy wires. It's cool stuff, much rarer than the other metals mentioned here - but due to the end of tubes and filament lights...who knows where the price goes. We have uses for it here, though. Rhenium is estimated at 1 ppb of earth's crust, and no where shows up as a concentrate - very hard to get.
Now, that's rare.
One thing meta-materials in nanotech ain't going to eliminate the need for is super high temp materials. One of the things I accumulate here in the phyzz stash is things like that, tantalum, niobium, vanadium - kind of semi-rare things for use around the lab. You can fool with catalysis and magnetism and such like with precise atomic arrangements of the cheaper elements (RE's might not retain the throne for magnets because of this), but they'll still melt/evaporate as easy as ever - and lose whatever cool properties you got from the special arrangement.