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Harriet Kelsall
17th December 2009 13:22

Ruthenium and its use in jewellery

 

Hi there

A week or two ago, Rebecca noticed that the price of ruthenium had suddenly more than doubled. Ruthenium is a metal which is within many of the alloys that we use. There is more about the metal itself here. Ruthenium (like palladium) is often sourced as a byproduct of mining platinum.

In the jewellery industry we obviously keep an eye on the commodities markets to see what is going on with the cost of metals. Whilst we unfortunately spend a lot more than the commodity prices on our lovely refined and alloyed metals that we use, the basic prices of course do directly impact on the cost of the metal that we buy to work with.

As you will no doubt already know, the price of gold and then platinum has been all over the place during this recession. Gold (and platinum) is normally seen to be a safe place to put your money when times are hard - you can see it, touch it and feel it - it seems a lot safer than banks (especially in recent times!). I have noticed that you can normally look at activity on the commodity markets and can sometimes work out why things have gone up or down even if you don't know loads about these things like me.

As we know, gold prices have been going up a lot recently and with that goes platinum (which had its 18 month high about a week ago). With platinum, the platinum group metals sometimes follow and sometimes not. You could say that maybe ruthenium is just following this activity but I have noticed it doesn't normally move at all so the sudden recent change in ruthenium confused me. It has remained very stable throughout all the goings on with gold and platinum over the last year despite everything. It is a platinum group metal and I suppose you could say that maybe it should have gone up sooner when the other platinum group metals did. But I was still interested in this. So I decided to put this question out there to the world on linked in.

Some interesting answers came back from some very nice people who know lots and lots about the commodities markets and have very scary sounding high powered jobs (to a jewellery designer like me!) You can see the answers here.

I was just so touched and pleased with how these people took the trouble to answer my question. One of them in particular (Mike who is a commodity trader) sent me a lot of useful links as well which I have been looking into with great interest. :-

Platinum trades on the NYMEX, part of the CME Group: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/platinum_quotes_globex.html

Here are some other links:

http://www.kitco.com/charts/liveplatinum.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenium
www.thebulliondesk.com

See you soon,

Harriet

Harriet Kelsall
 

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  • Harriet Kelsall Jewellery Design, North Barn, Fairclough Hall Farm, Halls Green, Weston, Hertfordshire, SG4 7DP, England
    Phone: +44 (0)1462 790565 Fax: +44 (0)1462 790140 enquiries@hkjewellery.co.uk
  • Harriet Kelsall Jewellery Design, 6/7 Green Street, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 3JU, England.
    Phone: +44 (0)1223 461333 Fax: +44 (0)1223 365269 cambridge@hkjewellery.co.uk

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