Lutetium has no claim to fame. Hardly anyone has ever heard of it and even fewer have any need for it. It sits there lonesome at the end of the lanthanide series which is already the least understood part of the periodic table.

Wait though…. it does have one small claim to fame. Among its peers it is easily the most expensive. The ores that yield bountiful amounts of cerium and neodymium typically contain just 0.001% of lutetium. It must be disheartening to fill a dumpster-sized vat full of ore to know that after many hours of labor intensive processing you may get just a spoon or two worth of this elusive metal. At least if you were actually using it for something.

We’d be liars to try to push lutetium as a hot investment. Even though it is genuinely rare its high price is simply a reflection of the difficulty of getting enough of it in its pure state and that, well, nobody actually needs it :-(