22 August, 2008. It is a remarkable collapse in pricing. Rhodium has fallen from a high of US$10,100/toz (toz = troy ounce) in early June of 2008 to opening price of US$3950/toz on 21 August, 2008, on the EIB. Bad news from automotive manufacturers General Motors, BMW, and Nissan is cited by Reuters and posted on Mineweb as the principle cause of the collapse. According to Reuters, the automotive industry accounts for 80 % of the demand for rhodium.
Other reasons are cited as contributing to the price fall. Electrical distribution problems interrupting mine activities has reportedly eased, reducing the jitteryness of buyers.
The rhodium market is small and illiquid, and few traders are prepared to speculate on a floor for prices.
The metal’s recent price falls have been blamed by some traders on forward selling, or hedging, by producers. If this is the case, the market should stabilise as these sales tail off.
Mineweb, 15 August, 2008
Ruthenium prices have been sitting at US$300/toz for months now. Apparently the news that sparked the major uptick in Ru prices last year has failed to produce real demand.
Gold opened on the EIB yesterday at US$835.57/toz. This is down considerably from mid July, no doubt adding some tarnish to the spate of ads urging consumers to buy gold.
Palladium has fallen to US$295/toz from the recent high of US$480/toz in mid June of ’08. This is good news for the chemical industry and chemical researchers.
Finally, Platinum has seen a price decline as well, opening at US$1465/toz against the Feb ’08 high of US$2275/toz. This is also good news for the chemical industry. Hopefully chemical buyers are in a position to hedge their PGM positions a bit.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Should I buy? Got a good separation prep Mr Process/Industry person?
Show us how good you really are!
http://coins.search.ebay.com/rhodium_Coins-Paper-Money_W0QQsacatZ11116
My guess is that the origin of this material is an automotive catalytic converter. 100 g of powdered ceramic material (if that is truly what it is) will not have much precious metal on it. You could extract with aqua regia and get some concentrate. But it will be a very small qty.
If you could get your hands on 100 kg, the extraction exercise might be worthwhile. I have not personally separated Pd, Pt, and Rh, so I can’t recommend a process from experience. I would begin my search with some early 20th century books on inorganic or analytical chemistry for insights. The PGM business keeps their process secrets tight.
I’ve heard of reports in the Southeast this summer where car thieves have recently begun removing catalytic converters from automobiles (apparently takes ~1 minute to do crudely). Apparently, the street cost of each CC was anywhere from $100-500.
I think that these converters are worth this much to companies who have already committed the resources to production facilities, equipment, staff, and analytical capability, and already have a buyer who will take their product.
If you pull $500 worth of residues (Pd, Pt, Rh) from converters, you need to spend maybe half of that on an assay (ICPMS ??) to set a real price point.
The extraction of real value from converters quickly turns into a full time proposition. To be worthwhile, you should aim for ca $200,000 or more per employee per year in gross sales.
If the metal residues were fairly pure, you would have more options as to how to offload the material. If it is an alloy of metals difficult to separate, the number of potential buyers narrows considerably.
I was once told their was gold in seawater. I wonder that the theoretical price of gold would have to be in order to make that extraction profitable. Assuming we just evaporate off the water (as a crude first step).
A gold mine I know in this area has a vein with 8-12 g of Au per ton. I think that is considered quite rich. Given that sea water is full of Na, Mg, Ca, carbonates, halides, sulfate, calcium, potassium, etc., removing the 6 10^(-10) wt % that is gold will be a tough job. It might be slightly more profitable to play the lotto.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chemlab/chem3-5/ionx2/full_text/appendix.html