Even if you’d heard of this year’s best-performing metals, betting on them would probably have been a struggle.
Ruthenium, iridium and the somewhat better known rhodium – used mostly in specialised products like hard disks, spark plugs and autocatalysts – have trounced almost all major commodities tracked by Bloomberg. Prices are up at least 33% this year as demand improved for raw materials that are among the world’s rarest and collected as byproducts of mining the precious metals platinum and palladium.