gold must be high because i got a neighbor scrapping gold like a motherfucker. coming home with piles of cash. hes been stock piling computer parts and electronics for like a decade.
Gold just tagged an all time high, silver hit a 6 year high, silver was climbing like 6% daily for like a week straight, the dollar is weakening, print trillions, it happens
gold is a precious metal, it works inverse of the economy, silver mostly is too, but there's some argument that it's used for solar panels, so it's an industrial commodity, but I'm in the "silver is money camp"
copper, steel, aluminum, lead are industrial commodities, and pretty much track with oil, lumber, home values and stock prices. There is lag time in price changes, there's speculating, there's all kinds of shit reasons you can have gaps between trends for a while, but longer term, they track together.
I take car bodies to one yard, they pay the most and have the easiest access and process, then take batteries and aluminium wheels to another yard that doesn't have a car crusher, and doesn't really want cars, so they don't compete on price.
Steel is high enough that I'll buy $50 cars and take them to scrap, but not high enough that I'm going to my laydown yard to load up cores and bent fenders in the summer heat.
Catalytic converters have platinum palladium rhodium, etc, they switch back and forth on platinum and palladium depending on the market. Investors and speculators drive these prices up and down, platinum is/was a precious metal and a hedge against the dollar, but with cars getting more and bigger cats, it seems to be driven more and more by new car sales.
copper is just under $3lb spot, hasn't been that high for 12 months or so, copper topped at $4.50lb a couple times in my mining career, fucking insane bonuses, overtime, spending, i probably could have shit on a desk on camera and they wouldn't have pulled me off of a job to talk about it
Steel seems to be higher the closer to the port you are, the closer to a freeway, the closer to a rail line, etc, it's most valuable when it's shredded and at a port in India or China, when it was 240t in AZ it was 450t in LA, I heard stories about broke down cars getting stolen and scrapped before the guy got back with a gas can
10 years ago I was scrapping 30 tons a month, which was a fuck ton. I'm at dinner with family friend's, and somebody brought their mid 40s gf from India or some far off land, and somebody mentioned scrap metal, her eyes lit up and asked me if i could get a lot? Apparently her family needed shiploads, and I was a small fish
If I fudged a number or date, it's just my $.02. Which is $.04 if pre 1982 pennies...
they won't give you anything for shit like appliances, or a car depending on what's there or not. If scrap prices are up, they may pay a bit for certain cars, but it's definitely not the same as clean steel or iron.