Forget Gold, Rhodium Is What You Crave (Tuvalu $100 1oz Rhodium South Sea Dragon)

Nice coin for sure, but out of my budget.

The main problem with Rhodium is that the average precious metals dealer has no means to reliably determine Rhodium content. That and the wild long-term price swings means that it will likely be a niche market for quite some time.

Rhodium's value lies in the combination of its utility, for catalysts and niche electronics applications, with its overall rarity. It's price therefore depends on supply (political stability in rhodium source-countries such as Russia, South Africa and Canada) and demand (whether or not alternatives to rhodium in its applications are cost-effective). With virtually no aesthetic demand, the investor component of the overall demand equation is essentially nonexistent.

TLDR: gold is valuable because a whole bunch of people are pointing to it and saying "that's valuable". Rhodium is valuable solely because it's both rare and useful.

However, unlike, say, palladium, there is very little "future-foreseeable" demand for rhodium; it's long-term price is therefore entirely dependent on people either discovering entirely new uses for it, or discovering new ways of substituting cheaper elements for rhodium in its current applications.

The other problem rhodium has is that there's no such thing as a "rhodium mine"; it's so scarce, it is only ever obtained as a tiny by-product from mining other minerals, such as nickel or platinum. Its supply-demand cycle is thus also linked to the cycles for nickel and platinum; if there's a platinum glut, then people stop mining and processing platinum - which also causes a halt to rhodium production, whether there's a demand slump for rhodium or not.

All this combines to make the rhodium price highly, highly volatile. You quote a price of $11,000/ounce. Which sounds great, until you realize that two years ago, the price was $29,000/ounce.