Best-performing metals as hard to trade as they are to find

(July 17): 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.

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