The trading price of platinum is not about to go down. One reason? With every new year, platinum is finding new applications in healthcare and medicine.

Let’s take a closer look.

Maybe It’s Time to Protect Yourself

Have you ever seen the silent movie “The Great Train Robbery” that was produced by Thomas A. Edison back in 1903? Even today, it is an exciting film to watch, showing thieves stopping a train and making off with bags of money and jewelry that they take from passengers.

Not long ago, we had a call from a man who had bought a box of 16 rolls of gold-plated jewelry chain at an auction where the assets of a closed jewelry manufacturer were being sold to the public. “I weighed the box,” he told us, “it weighs about 12 pounds . . . so what is it worth?”

After you send your platinum scrap to Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners and we extract the pure platinum it contains, where will that platinum be used?

Platinum is bright, shiny and resistant to tarnish. It can be used to make beautiful jewelry, labware, and even the outside casings of implantable medical devices. For those reasons, many people believe that the only way to produce a piece of platinum - be it a ring, a lab crucible or anything else - is to cast it in one piece.

All precious metals investors like to be on the lookout for bright, shiny chunks of pure metal. Of them all, platinum jewelry, coins and bullion shine the brightest. They are white and shiny, with no tarnish. You look at them and immediately know they are valuable.

For centuries, gold has been thought of as the greatest, most beautiful and most desirable metal in the world. That concept has entered popular culture in many ways. When a product or commodity is spoken of as the best of its kind, it is called “the gold standard.” When athletes compete at the Olympics, the first-place winners are awarded gold medals. And through the ages, many events have happened because of gold. There was the Gold Rush of 1849. Centuries earlier, Spanish explorers sailed to the New World in search of El Dorado, a city made of gold.

Last month, a development firm from New York bought a vacant 50-acre manufacturing complex from Caterpillar in Milwaukee. And in the same month, the vacant 37,000 square foot Vista Pointe Industrial Plaza building in San Diego was sold to a California developer.  

What are the best places to find huge quantities of precious metals?

How to Avoid Myths and Mistakes

Many answers are flying around to that question. Unfortunately, many of those answers are just plain wrong. In today’s post, let’s take a closer look.

Have you every had a fantasy like this?

Your old Uncle Chuck died and while you are clearing out his house, you find an old watch in his dresser drawer. It has a stainless steel case, nothing special. But the appraiser who comes to evaluate the estate says, “Hold on, this watch isn’t made of stainless steel, it’s made of platinum and is worth at least $10,000.”

We watched the royal wedding. Did you?

And while we were caught up in the wonderful spectacle of two young people starting their married life together, we couldn’t help noticing that a lot of jewelry was on display too. (We assume that most of the gold and gemstones we saw were the real thing, given the wealth of the celebrities in attendance and the serious nature of the event.)

Where to Find Precious Metals in Your Local Junkyard

Where can you find platinum scrap, gold, and other precious metals in your local automotive scrapyard? Here’s a guide.

We have written a lot on our blog about the most common places to find platinum scrap, including catalytic converters, lab equipment, and thermocouples.

We have written on this blog before about retrieving gold scrap from old computers. It is actually pretty easy to do, since you can see the gold, which is mostly found on the little pins that are on the edges of motherboards, printed circuit boards, memory chips - in the little pins that are used to plug those devices into surrounding contact blocks.