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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. · What…

Tomas Herrera · 12 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 · 15 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 · 17 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…adily deliverable bars. · 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 · 13 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 · 13 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 selling era, and why it was orderly · The 1990s disposals are often recalled as a collective loss of faith. The record i…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 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 · 18 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…ont of a bracelet has, unaided, almost no way to distinguish 750 fineness from 375 with a good finish. · Societies that traded gold seriously worked this out early and built an institution rather than a gadget. The hallmark — a set of small punched symbols applied by a body with…

Yusuf Demir · 12 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…ith has a ruined piece from the year they learned this. · The bench pin, the graver and a good lamp. The core toolkit has changed remarkably little since the Renaissance. Close-up of a goldsmith engraving gold sheet under a workbench lamp · Techniques that survived the industrial…

Yusuf Demir · 11 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 · 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…

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 · 17 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 · 15 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…he formal channel rather than genuine consumption. Divergence between India and China — a good early signal that one market's move is local policy rather than a global change in appetite. · Duty, hallmarking and the informal channel · Governments that see large gold imports on th…

Yusuf Demir · 16 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 · 16 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

Counterfeiting gold is not about making something that looks right. It is about defeating a specific test, and the industry's defences are an escalating conversation between forgers and instruments. ·…

Tomas Herrera · 15 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 · 15 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 · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

Pure gold is too soft to hold a stone, too soft to hold an edge, and the wrong colour for half the world's taste. Almost everything you own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where t…

Tomas Herrera · 16 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 · 12 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…