No, you're ignoring the actual point to quibble about mechanics again. What I'm effectively saying is that if you bring half a million tons of platinum to market you kill the price of platinum and lose money, and if you go harvest an asteroid at great expense but don't bring the metals to the market, you also lose money. Exactly how you get it to market is completely beside the point of my question.
You are fundamentally failing to understand the steps of the process here.
For the Platinum
futures market, yes the arrival of an asteroid like that would probably crash the hell out of it. Futures markets are literally a mixture of confidence game and gambling anyways, which is why investing in them is called 'speculating.'
What Platinum costs
right now is dependent on how much is
actually on the market, with some
limited influence based on what people think iis
going to be on the mark.
The people who control that asteroid,
control how much they bring to market. Unless a massive ground-based Platinum strike is found, or some amazing new technology for refining it happens, the market
without their interference is going to be largely stable. A new highly-profitable
use for Platinum could also drive the price on Earth
up, so that's a factor as well.
So now you have the continuing trade in Platinum on Earth, and an Asteroid with tons of Platinum sitting in orbit. Until that Platinum starts to
actually come down from orbit, the supply doesn't change. There will be some
limited influence on the market because of the expectation of an increase in supply, but
until they start landing the product, the actual supply does not change.
They could park that asteroid in orbit for a
year at basically no cost, and it wouldn't make a damned difference to the actual supply of Platinum available.
Once they
do decide to start selling their Platinum, who decides how much gets landed at once?
They do. Are they going to deliberately sell so much of it so fast that they can't make back their investment.
Of course they aren't. That would be
idiotic, and if they were idiots, they wouldn't have managed to get the thing and drag it into orbit in the first place.
They
will be able to undercut market prices though, so they can sell at a moderately lower price, that still nets them a huge amount of money. The
current list price I found for Platinum is ~761.80 US$ per ounce. Converting to kilos, that gets us 26,815 US $ per kilo, or 26.8 million US$ per ton. A quick search gets us a little over
300 tons of Platinum production per year on Earth, though the number is old so that might have changed somewhat substantially.
If they sell too much Platinum at once, that
will collapse the market value. If they sell, say 30 tons, upping the supply by 10%, at a reduced cost getting them 20,000 US$ per kilo instead so they can guarantee sales, that gets them 600 million US $ a year.
If your investment cost to get the asteroid in is 14 billion dollars, probably not worth it, not unless Platinum is a secondary money-maker from what you're harvesting out of that rock. If the investment cost is more like 1.4 billion?
Selling 30 tons of Platinum per year is probably worth that.
Now, to stress something, assuming that the company that goes out to fetch this rock is American, and thus has the US defense apparatus protecting their investment in space,
nobody can force them to sell it any faster than they want to. It's their rock. They found it, claimed it, paid the costs, and unless there's a national emergency that suddenly needs a butt-load of Platinum, nobody's taking it from them. Even if there is such an emergency, they'd probably just be compelled to supply the fed, not the world markets as a whole.
The company owning that rock chooses how fast to bring its resources down. And it is entirely in their power to choose to do so at a rate that doesn't ruin them financially.