Seems to me like you need to separate what is cool and what is a good investment.

Bars of indium = very cool

Bars of indium != Reasonable investment

@NivlacM Agreed. Though the question is how unreasonable. If you guys are collectively correct there’s 40% prob that I won’t regret it. Probably better wrt getting married :-D

@mariopasquato I would give you better odds for a marriage given the amount of effort and thought you've put into buying some indium

You will have to get it assayed to sell it which will be a pain, quite likely impossible. If you want exposure invest in an Indium producer like TECK or better yet, a rare earth ETF like REMX.

Well what kind of returns are you looking for? What do you think the price will be in five years time? You're not giving us much to go on here!

@vitamind I don’t have any private information on the price in five years. I just read a bunch of stuff online about how indium is produced as a byproduct of zinc extraction, it’s produced mostly in China and Korea, and it’s used for LCD displays and solder. See e.g. https://www.acs.org/greenchemistry/research-innovation/endangered-elements/indium.html

What's the alternative?

If the counterfactual is just buying SNP500, you will almost certainly regret it. If the counterfactual is leaving the money in a bank account, maybe not.

@LoganZoellner This is a great question! The counterfactual is the best realistic use of that money in hindsight, given that the metric is subjective regret. Obviously hindsight is 20/20 so I won’t be comparing with the best possible use of that money (that would always lead to regret) but with the best use that I could realistically have made of it. This is not limited to investment. Assume that losing this money is not going to negatively affect my standard of living in a significant way.

@mariopasquato Would you, in your subjective judgment as of now and/or market creation, agree that "just put it in some kind of generic market index fund like the S&P or something" is a good baseline alternative?

Are you planning to track all associated fees and costs, such as shipping fees, assay costs, and so on? (As in, write them down or store them in a spreadsheet or otherwise be able to tally them up at market close.)

@EvanDaniel I would agree with this though I am not sure I will be diligently writing down all expenses

If i was you would just stick with gold, silver, etc.
Even for the fact that you can sell gold again pretty easy but where will you sell your indium? Seems like a small niche market to me

@NielS Right, that’s exactly one of the reasons why I am hesitant

Why not buy contracts?

@RanaG How would you go about it? For an Italian citizen who is a Canadian (Quebec) tax resident

@mariopasquato open an account with a brokerage (Interactive Investors comes to mind) and ask them to provide you with x amount of Indium futures