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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 without questio…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…ssay, a technique older than the periodic table, remains the referee method for purity. · Good Delivery accreditation governs which bars trade without re-assay in the wholesale market. · Provenance documentation now determines a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · Recy…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…nter market and COMEX futures, with the two tethered by the EFP spread. · The twice-daily LBMA auction is a benchmark-setting mechanism for contract settlement, not the market itself. · Regional premiums in Shanghai, Mumbai and Istanbul are logistics and policy signals, not arbit…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…y? The set of accredited refiners, approved vaults and recognised carriers within which a Good Delivery bar can move without losing its status. Metal that leaves the chain — held privately, for example — can re-enter, but normally only after assay or re-refining, because the guar…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…rship of metal. · Fewer than two per cent of COMEX gold futures contracts typically go to delivery; the contract is a price instrument first and a delivery mechanism second. · The costs that decide long-run outcomes are the ones nobody quotes: fund expense ratios, futures roll, s…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 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

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…to accept unfavourable terms rather than wait for a fair-value buyer, none of which are a good sign for anyone standing on the other side of the transaction. · A short checklist before any private purchase Confirm the dealer is established and reviewable. Insist on a recognised r…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…d in a single shipment. · The logistics of moving gold are unglamorous and unforgiving. A Good Delivery bar weighs about twelve and a half kilograms, and a hundred tonnes of them is eight thousand bars — a volume that would fit comfortably in a modest living room and a mass that…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…es are unglamorous: bare concrete, sodium lighting, wooden pallets stacked with 400-ounce Good Delivery bars, each weighing around 12.4 kilograms, arranged so that porters wearing felt-soled shoes — leather-soled boots strike sparks and scuff the vault floor — can move them with…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…better. Hand-raised and fabricated work has denser, work-hardened metal and no porosity; good casting is consistent, efficient and capable of forms that cannot be fabricated. Poor examples of each are easy to find, and the maker matters more than the method. · Why does the same…

Yusuf Demir · 16 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

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…s 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 accreditation and periodic audit rather than a separate assay office punc…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…und. The metal-rich asteroids that get cited contain gold at concentrations comparable to good terrestrial ore, and the binding constraint is the cost of retrieving mass from orbit, not the grade. · Start with a fact that sounds like a metaphor and is not: no process available to…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

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

…e bars when they arrived. Every returned bar was melted down and recast to current London Good Delivery standard — a process that weighs the metal, assays its fineness and produces a new, verified bar with a new serial number. You cannot hide a tungsten core through a melt. The B…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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

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

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…spatial relationships that turn a pile of gold into a historical argument can be lost for good. The single most consequential variable in whether a hoard becomes evidence or merely becomes bullion is what its finder does in the first forty-eight hours. · What hoards reveal about…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…e slowed. · Is there a tax on gold in India? Yes, India applies both an import duty and a Goods and Services Tax (GST) on gold. The combined tax rate can be significant, which often leads to a wide gap between international and domestic prices and creates incentives for unofficia…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

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

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…ratory material while making claims the laboratory material does not support. There is no good clinical evidence for the cognitive or anti-ageing benefits advertised. Readers should treat those products as unrelated to the science described here. · What it means for the metal · N…

Amara Okonjo · 19 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…

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…for the patient. · Beyond electronics, gold nanoparticles are being used in targeted drug delivery systems and as contrast agents in advanced imaging. Their ability to be functionalised with specific proteins allows them to bind to cancer cells, enabling more precise diagnosis an…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…ng claim is on a physical, auditable asset rather than on nothing. · The token is only as good as the audit behind it — a monthly bar list and an independent reserve attestation are the minimum a serious issuer publishes. Redemption terms vary sharply: some platforms deliver phys…

Marguerite Adler · 14 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

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

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

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

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…settlements, refinery statistics, reserve disclosures, company filings — is reproduced in good faith and is only as reliable as its source. Where a figure is disputed, contested or subject to later revision, we say so in the piece rather than presenting a single number as settled…