Rhodium

What a whippy week it was. Volatility spiked and then subsided into the end of the week which meant it was a great day-trading environment but then that petered off as ranges tightened for markets and stocks into the end of the week.

The first Canadian mid-market chief financial officer (CFO) survey published today by GE Capital, shows that local metals and mining companies are extremely positive about the current state of the industry, but less optimistic about the state of the world economy.

Bosco Ntaganda, a fugitive UN war crimes suspect who recently defected from the army and is believed to be behind Democratic Republic of Congo’s most recent rebellion, is apparently bankrolling the operation with war money he made while controlling the country’s lucrative mines, publishes Global Witness.

"Space is big. Really Big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely, mind-bogglingly big," as the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy once noted. About the only thing nearly as big, it seems safe to say, are today's hopes of making money exploring space.

Aquarius Platinum said its Mimosa mine has not been affected by the recent directive from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe regarding the suspension of banking services for certain mining companies.

Smaller miners are waiting for production cutbacks by the market leaders to prop up prices the way Saudi-Arabia comes to the rescue of oil producing nations whenever the crude price begins to flag.

Prophecy Platinum added 2.5% on Friday on double usual trading volumes, after announcing results of a full spectrum analysis of PGMs on the first batch of samples from its PGM-Ni-Cu wholly-owned Wellgreen project, in the Yukon, Canada.

Zimbabwe's central bank threatened to freeze Impala Platinum's local account and ordered local banks to halt managing any of the company’s exports because it has “failed to comply with an order to bank locally,” state-controlled newspaper The Herald reports.

Less than a month after officially launching its asteroid-mining plans, Google’s billionaire co-founders and filmmaker James Cameron’s owned company Planetary Resources, has already decided not to accept any more job applications.