Thallium: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Thallium is a highly toxic metal recovered in small amounts from the flue dust of zinc, lead and copper smelters. Uses are medical imaging, electronics, optical glass and research, supplied by a few firms on private quotes, so prices are opaque.
No public price Thallium has no public monthly price series: Tiny toxic-metal trade on private quotes; no public price series.What its price moves with
Thallium concentrates in the dust and residues of zinc smelting and roasting. Supply follows zinc refining, and most thallium in ore is never recovered because demand is so small that a few plants can meet it all.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Lead smelting also yields thallium-bearing residues. As with zinc, recovery happens only when a buyer exists, so a handful of smelters in China and elsewhere set supply for the whole world market.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Copper smelter flue dust carries some thallium, adding to the by-product pool. New copper smelting capacity does not turn into thallium supply unless the smelter also installs and runs a recovery circuit for it.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Thallium iodide was added to some metal-halide lamps to give green light. As LED lighting replaces discharge lamps, this outlet is fading and leaves medical and electronic uses as the main demand.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.