Why should you invest in rare earth metals?

ALTERNATIVES

Bill de Lucy, managing director of Fyfield Metal Assets, explains the rationale behind investing in rare earth metals.

During times of economic turmoil, investors typically turn to the safe haven assets of precious metals and oil, but rare earth metals provide a new opportunity. What are rare earth metals? Rare earth metals include 17 chemical elements of the periodic table not often found, thus they are referred to as ‘rare’. They originate in high concentrations in the earth’s crust, but are difficult and costly to extract with concentrations occurring in certain parts of the world. Together with industrial and technical metals such as bismuth, chromium, cobalt, gallium, hafnium, indium, molybdenu...