Search
Search the whole magazine.
Full-text search across every article — headlines, decks, body copy, pull quotes, captions and FAQs — plus our editorial and legal policies.
26 results for “Fineness”
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
…terpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A hallmark certifies fineness verified by an independent third party — not weight, value, age or craftsmanship. · Fire assay remains the referee method; XRF is fast and non-destructive but reads only the surface…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…gold. XRF is excellent for detecting alloy fraud in jewellery and for confirming surface fineness; it is structurally incapable of seeing a core. · What does ultrasonic testing actually measure? The speed of sound through the object. Longitudinal velocity in gold is roughly 3,24…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…le market. · Provenance documentation now determines a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · Recycled scrap is a large and often more profitable feedstock than mined doré, but it demands heavier sorting and compliance work before it ever reaches the furnace. · The metall…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
Science · 9 August 2026
The Metallurgy of Karat
…lease limit, which is why palladium white gold dominates the European trade. · Millesimal fineness (750, 585, 375) states the same fact as karat in parts per thousand and is the number an assay office actually verifies. · Is 24k gold better than 18k? Purer, not better. 24k is the…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
…st be shipped to an accredited refinery, assayed precisely and re-refined to a guaranteed fineness before it can enter the fungible bullion market. · What does Good Delivery status actually certify? Good Delivery is a list, maintained by the London Bullion Market Association, of…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
…ds to price faster than mine output can. · Scrap is priced off spot, adjusted for assayed fineness, then discounted for testing, refining, transport and each intermediary's margin. · High-street payouts commonly land well below spot for the contained gold; specialist refiners buy…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Markets · 11 September 2026
The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold
…York and Paris to Frankfurt, melting and recasting every returned bar to check weight and fineness. The exercise was completed ahead of schedule and is the closest thing to a full external audit any large holder has conducted and described publicly. · Does the audit gap affect th…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
…· The London market clears in 400-ounce bars of variable weight, refined to a minimum 995 fineness. Comex futures deliver against 100-ounce bars and kilobars. Most Asian markets, and the retail demand behind them, want kilobars at 9999 fineness. These are not interchangeable obje…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Markets · 18 August 2026
The Vault Beneath the City
…armarking. An earmarked bar is identified by a unique serial number, a refiner's stamp, a fineness assay and a weight, and it is allocated in the vault's records to one specific owner. It sits physically in a caged compartment assigned to that owner, stacked on wooden pallets in…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…able to routine in about a decade. · ~12.4 kg Weight of a Good Delivery bar 995.0 Minimum fineness for Good Delivery 400 oz Nominal bar size, wholesale market Nobody's liability Gold's defining reserve property · The costs nobody advertises · Repatriation is not free, and the bil…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Craft · 5 June 2026
The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't
…d piece are a compressed provenance record: the sponsor's mark identifying the maker, the fineness in millesimal form, the assay office town mark, and in some systems a date letter. It is the oldest continuously operating consumer protection scheme in existence, running in Britai…
Yusuf Demir · 16 min read
Markets · 17 August 2026
Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars
…An unallocated balance is a bank's promise to deliver a stated quantity of gold of stated fineness. It is not a bailment. The metal backing that promise is not segregated, not numbered, and not necessarily sitting still — the bank may lease it, use it to settle other obligations,…
Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read
Craft · 3 August 2026
The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor
…Indian retail standard 1 kg Kilobar size refined specifically for the Asian trade 99.99% Fineness Asian buyers expect on an investment kilobar · The digitisation of the bazaar · The traditional gold jewellery market is undergoing a digital transformation as retailers seek to rea…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Markets · 6 August 2026
Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again
…t the metal moving. Refining and upgrading — converting existing holdings of older, lower-fineness bars into current Good Delivery specification so they are tradeable without assay disputes. · Why the reported numbers lag Official reserve statistics are self-reported, published w…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Mining · 5 August 2026
Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit
A gold mine is not a hole with gold in it. It is a spreadsheet with a hole attached — and the single number that decides which rock is ore and which rock is waste moves every time the price does. · Mo…
Amara Okonjo · 20 min read
Mining · 19 August 2026
Nine Grams a Tonne
What does it actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices…
Amara Okonjo · 18 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
Industrial demand is the quietest third of the gold market: a few tenths of a gram per handset, multiplied by billions of devices, chosen not for prestige but because nothing else conducts as reliably…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
History · 14 July 2026
The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money
For roughly five thousand years, humanity kept returning to the same element to settle its debts. The story is less about greed than about the unusually boring chemistry of atomic number 79. · Gold's…
Marguerite Adler · 14 min read
History · 9 August 2026
The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us
A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…
Marguerite Adler · 16 min read
Science · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
Divide gold finely enough and it stops being gold-coloured, stops being inert in the way you expect, and starts doing work in places no bullion bar could reach — including the test strip that told you…
Amara Okonjo · 19 min read
Mining · 22 May 2026
The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem
A significant share of the world's gold is produced by people working with hand tools, informal finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisa…
Amara Okonjo · 15 min read
Markets · 8 September 2026
The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do
For two decades the gold price could be read off an inflation-linked bond screen. Then, somewhere after 2022, the relationship stopped behaving — and the argument about why has become the most consequ…
Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Science · 10 August 2026
Where Gold Actually Comes From
Every gram of gold on Earth was manufactured in an astrophysical catastrophe, arrived here after the planet had already formed, and was then concentrated by hot water. Three separate accidents, none o…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Markets · 2 August 2026
Who Actually Sets the Gold Price
There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
