What if you bought Palladium (oz) in 2000?
Commodities · Metal. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play2.2× · S&P 500 same money: $4,626
$1,000 in Palladium (oz) at the start of 2000 would be worth about $2,222 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Palladium is a byproduct metal, mined mostly in Russia (by Norilsk Nickel) and South Africa, and used chiefly in catalytic converters for petrol cars. Around 2000 Russian export delays caused a squeeze that briefly pushed it above $1,000 an ounce; Ford, which had stockpiled at high prices, later took a large write-down. The price then collapsed and spent most of the 2000s in the low hundreds.
The great run began in the 2010s, when the diesel scandal pushed European buyers toward petrol cars, China tightened emission rules and supply stayed stubbornly flat. By 2019 palladium had overtaken gold for the first time in about two decades, and it hit records near $3,000 in 2022 as Russia invaded Ukraine and buyers worried about sanctions on the dominant supplier. Then high prices cured themselves: carmakers substituted cheaper platinum where they could, the shift to battery electric cars threatened demand for converters altogether, and the price fell by more than half. It ended this period roughly where it stood in the mid-2010s.
The lesson: High prices cure high prices: when a material gets too expensive, industrial buyers engineer around it, and the demand that drove the rally starts to vanish.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $450 | $2,222 | $4,626 | 2.2× |
| 2003 | $240 | $4,167 | $7,727 | 4.2× |
| 2005 | $185 | $5,405 | $5,763 | 5.4× |
| 2007 | $335 | $2,985 | $4,789 | 3.0× |
| 2008 | $370 | $2,703 | $4,626 | 2.7× |
| 2010 | $420 | $2,381 | $6,071 | 2.4× |
| 2012 | $650 | $1,538 | $5,312 | 1.5× |
| 2015 | $800 | $1,250 | $3,301 | 1.2× |
| 2018 | $1,080 | $926 | $2,519 | 0.9× |
| 2020 | $1,900 | $526 | $2,092 | 0.5× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2005, turning $1,000 into $5,405. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,763.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Palladium (oz) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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