Talk:Precious metal/Archives/2015

Market price table

I've tried to clean up the market price table. I don't quite understand its purpose. It appears to have been created to list current prices of representative metals.[1]. Now though it includes data from three dates, which suggests that it's intended to provide an historical price context, but it only includes data for the last three quarters, and at irregular intervals. A snapshot of current prices would be useful, combined perhaps with an historical price chart, but I haven't looked yet for a (free) source of historical data to use and reference. Can anyone suggest such a source?

The data itself is incompletely sourced. The 10 Apr 2009 data "is taken mostly from London metal exchange" [2], but no other source is named nor which of the nine prices came from the LME. "Data from 22th july 2009 are from the the bulliondesk com taken, except Germanium, Gallium" [3], indium, and beryllium, perhaps indirectly through this table. Prices for Ge, Ga, and In came from MinorMetals.com [4]. Neither source appears to track Be; where that price came from is a mystery. No source is cited for the 7 Jan 2010 data, which should therefore be removed. Yappy2bhere (talk) 23:50, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

First, as for sources, I don't have anything for most of the metals on the list, but http://www.xe.com/ict/ has historical information on most currency exchange rates recorded at noon, daily back into 1995, and has information for platinum, gold, and silver back to 3-Nov-97, and palladium back to 30-Nov-98. They do, of course, list price of these metals by ounce, not kilogram, and it's not indicated whether they're standard ounces or troy ounces. (Xe uses 3-letter currency codes for their currencies, precious metals are listed as X followed by the chemical symbol in caps, platinum is XPT, gold is XAU, so on. Interestingly, defunct currencies are also listed with X as the first letter, and most current currencies are listed by a country abbreviation that's two letters long followed by the first letter of the currency's name).

Second, I'd like to point out that currently the market price table will not sort correctly according to price. I'm not familiar with how the Wikipedia standards for that work, and don't have time to look it up right now, otherwise I would have found a way of fixing that myself. (Astrocom (talk) 05:06, 13 June 2010 (UTC))

An additional point that I would like to mention is that the "Market Price Table" gives it's prices in an unstated dollar currency, making it impossible to obtain the actual value for any given period - and as such rendering it essentially useless. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.151.66.170 (talk) 12:57, 15 July 2010 (UTC)

The purpose of the market price table seems obvious to me. Precious metals are commonly used as bullion, and bullion is a type of money. So the price is of immediate and primary importance in this article. Of course, the prices should be listed in troy ounces, and not in of the many other types of ounce nor in kilograms, since the troy ounce has long been and still is the international standard for measuring bullion. US dollars works for me, since I'm an american, but the other big international currencie, the euro, should also be included. Rwflammang (talk) 18:30, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I am not typically a Wikipedia editor. But I do want to point out that at least some of this price data is incorrect. Gold has gone down by around 20% between Jan 2010 and Dec 2014, in dollars. The chart by contrast shows 50% appreciation in this time. This is off by a great deal. The 7 January 2010 gold data is certainly wrong. Gold was around $1500/ounce then, which is roughly $50,000 per kg. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.207.250.71 (talk) 16:13, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Price weapon grade plutonium is most expensive!

According to this article: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2008/AndrewMorel.shtml

Weapon grade plutonium is valued at upto $150.000USD per ounce.