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Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

Somewhere between a mine's doré bar and a Good Delivery brick sits a chain of chlorination furnaces, electrolytic cells, assay labs and accreditation committees that decides which gold the world's markets will accept witho…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars

…carry different custody and counterparty terms. · A physically backed ETF holds allocated bars in a custodian vault, but a retail holder owns fund shares, not title to a serial-numbered bar. · Unallocated bullion accounts are the plumbing of the wholesale market and are, in law,…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

A doré bar arrives at 85 per cent purity and leaves at 99.99. Between those two numbers sit chlorine gas, aqua regia, an electrolytic cell and a chain of custody that is now as valuable as the meta…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…ses. It rarely makes news, and it is the reason a spot price in London can diverge from a bar in New York. · Allocated custody means specific numbered bars belong to you; unallocated means you are a creditor of the bank, and the difference only becomes visible in a crisis. · A ba…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…sale settlement. A loco London price is a price for metal deliverable there, which is why bars in that system carry a liquidity premium. · Does repatriation affect the gold price? Not directly, since ownership does not change. The indirect effect is on the free float: metal moved…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…ved between anonymous compartments by a handful of porters who never touch the metal with bare hands. This is how sovereign gold is actually stored, audited and, occasionally, brought home. · The Bank of England holds roughly 400,000 bars for around 100 account holders, most of t…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…X trade at a different level again because they include financing and storage to a future delivery date. · Why is the price I pay for a coin higher than the spot price? Because spot is a wholesale price for 400-ounce bars that never leave a vault. A retail coin adds refining, min…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…ior. · Ultrasonic velocity testing is the standard front-line defence against core-filled bars, because sound travels through tungsten far faster than through gold. · For coins, precise dimensional gauging is unusually powerful: the mint's tolerances are tighter than a counterfei…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…ined, deliverable metal, and scrap is none of those things yet. Between the counter and a good delivery bar sit testing, transport, insurance, refining losses and refining charges, plus a margin at each intermediary. A buyer paying spot would be operating at a loss. · Is recycled…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold

…ted everywhere and verified almost nowhere. Between the published number and the physical bar sits a chain of certificates, custodians and fifty-year-old count sheets. This is an attempt to walk that chain honestly. · Official sector gold holdings — around 36,000 tonnes — are rep…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…an independent test is trusting the enforcement regime as much as the metal. · Do bullion bars carry the same kind of hallmark as jewellery? Not exactly. Good Delivery bars carry a refiner's stamp, a serial number, fineness and weight, verified through the refiner's own accredita…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…pean sales 2010 Official sector turns net buyer for the first time in a generation 400 oz Good Delivery bar size in which reserves are almost always held · The Basel III effect · The reclassification of gold under Basel III regulations has subtly but profoundly altered the calcul…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…lems, and buyers frequently import the wrong intuition from one to the other. A 400-ounce Good Delivery bar or an investment coin is engineered purely for fineness and recognisability; it will typically be struck or cast at 999.9 fine and never has to survive being worn against s…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…ured, 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 whether you had a virus. · Gold nanoparticles are red because collective electron oscillations — surface plasmons — absorb green ligh…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…en Earth formed sank into the core with the iron; the gold we mine arrived later, in a bombardment known as the late veneer. · Ore is not made by geology delivering gold to one place but by hot water dissolving trace gold from enormous volumes of rock and dropping it in a narrow…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

Half the world's gold is worn, not stored. In India and China that distinction barely exists — and the buying behaviour it produces is the most reliably contrarian force in the entire market. · Jewellery is roughly half of annual gold demand, and the majority of it is…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

…bsurd — one gram drawn into three kilometres of wire. Inside a trade where the tools have barely changed and the hands are irreplaceable. · Pure gold is too soft for most wear; alloying trades purity for hardness and colour. · Karat is a fraction out of 24 — 18k is 75 per cent go…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…ibility ended official convertibility but not gold's role as a reserve asset. · Keynes's 'barbarous relic' critique was an argument against subordinating employment to mine output, not a dismissal of gold as a store of value. · Gold rushes and reserve accumulation are two sides o…

Marguerite Adler · 14 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 wha…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…attempt it are genuinely dangerous. · Does a higher gold price reduce electronics demand? Barely, in the short run. Gold is a rounding error in a device's cost structure, so a designer will not redesign a package to save two dollars. Sustained high prices do accelerate longer-ter…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…ing arcs, everything laid out on grey conservation foam with numbered markers and a scale bar. The image implies a story: someone hid this, in a hurry, because something was coming. That story is sometimes right. The difficulty is that the metal is silent on the point, and almost…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do

…e-traded fund flows drive the price or follow it? Mostly they follow. Fund holdings are a good real-time reading of Western investor conviction, and large redemptions can amplify a move, but through the 2022-2024 period the price rose while holdings fell — which is precisely why…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…d, or synthetic. Read the prospectus, not the ticker. · Physical dealing: coins and small bars carry dealer spreads, assay risk, counterfeit risk, storage cost and, in some jurisdictions, sales tax. The 'spot price' is not the price at which a retail buyer transacts. · Fraud: pre…

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…dy being paid, and rarely appears in any discussion of what gold costs to produce. · What good closure looks like · The best-run closures share a shape. Reagent circuits are rinsed and neutralised before the plant is stripped. Tailings surfaces are capped to exclude oxygen and sh…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…e buyers to regional traders to exporters and refiners, and by the time it is cast into a bar its origin is often untraceable. Certified programmes exist that pay a premium for documented, mercury-free production, but they cover only a small share of the sector. · Why do formalis…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…degraded typography. · 3. Categories in use · 3.1 Strictly necessary · These support page delivery, security and the recording of your own cookie choices. Without them the site cannot function correctly, so they are set without consent, as the law permits. They are first-party, c…

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…n before it. Nine grams a tonne was, not so many decades ago, considered a mediocre grade barely worth developing. Today, a mine averaging even half of that, worked at industrial scale with modern processing technology, can be a perfectly viable and profitable operation — which t…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…de why and how it is processed. Where we use service providers — for hosting, for content delivery, or for aggregate audience measurement — those providers act as processors on our written instructions and may not use reader data for their own purposes. · 2. The data we actually…

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