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21 results for “Troy ounce”
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
…ew York prices diverge? Because the two markets trade different things: London trades 400-ounce bars in a spot market, New York trades futures deliverable in 100-ounce and kilobar formats. Arbitrage requires physically moving and often re-casting metal, so when freight, refining…
Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read
Markets · 2 August 2026
Who Actually Sets the Gold Price
…ly the spot price for unallocated gold held in London vaults, expressed in US dollars per troy ounce. The LBMA Gold Price auction produces a separate benchmark twice each London business day, used to settle contracts. Futures on COMEX trade at a different level again because they…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…n case the first two disagree. Disagreements over a tenth of a per cent on a four-hundred-ounce bar are worth arguing about. · Fire assay: the referee · The determination that settles disputes is fire assay, a technique that predates the periodic table by two thousand years and h…
Tomas Herrera · 12 min read
Policies · 6 August 2026
Editorial Standards & Corrections
…inst a secondary report of it. Units, currencies and time periods are stated explicitly — troy ounces and metric tonnes are not interchangeable, and we do not let them blur. · Photographs are captioned with what they show and where they were taken. We do not stage news images or…
Mining · 5 August 2026
Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit
…t model. Companies restate them annually; a lower price assumption can delete millions of ounces from a reported reserve without a single rock changing composition. · Stand on the rim of a modern open-pit gold mine and the first thing that fails is intuition about scale. The haul…
Amara Okonjo · 16 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…ars — a volume that would fit comfortably in a modest living room and a mass that will destroy the floor of most buildings. Move that quantity across a border and you are dealing with armoured transport, aviation weight limits, insurance underwriters and, at each end, a vault tha…
Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read
Science · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
…t the nanometre scale does something no other convenient material does as reliably: it announces its own state, in colour, to the naked eye. · Why small gold is red · A bulk gold surface reflects. A gold particle twenty nanometres across — smaller than the wavelength of visible l…
Amara Okonjo · 15 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 lon…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
History · 14 July 2026
The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money
…rrencies were pegged to the dollar; the dollar alone was convertible into gold, at $35 an ounce, and only for foreign official holders. Ordinary Americans had been barred from holding monetary gold since 1933. · This was gold as a wholesale settlement asset — the metal moved betw…
Marguerite Adler · 14 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…el that absorbs base metals, and the remaining precious bead is parted and weighed. It destroys the sample and takes hours, and it remains the reference standard for settlement because it measures the whole sample rather than a surface or a proxy. · The popular image of gold frau…
Tomas Herrera · 15 min read
History · 9 August 2026
The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us
…ly visible in the metal itself; it is argued from context, and context is what looting destroys. · Coin hoards date the moment of burial well and the events around it badly; the newest coin gives a terminus post quem, not a cause. · Chemical and isotopic analysis can now tie anci…
Marguerite Adler · 16 min read
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
…yday standard 375 9 karat — legal as gold in some markets, not in others · Fire assay: destroying the sample to tell the truth · The referee method has barely changed in principle since the sixteenth century. A precisely weighed sample is wrapped with silver and lead and heated i…
Yusuf Demir · 12 min read
Craft · 5 June 2026
The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't
Gold's working properties are so extreme they border on the absurd — one gram drawn into three kilometres of wire. Inside a trade where the tools have barely changed and the hands are irreplaceable. ·…
Yusuf Demir · 11 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
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
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
Roughly a quarter of the world's annual gold supply has been gold before. It arrives as broken chains, single earrings and dental crowns, and it moves through a chain of intermediaries that most selle…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 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. · Jewell…
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 wh…
Tomas Herrera · 13 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 · 18 min read
Markets · 6 August 2026
Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again
For three decades official institutions were net sellers of bullion, and the policy consensus treated the metal as a museum piece. Then, quietly, the world's reserve managers reversed. The reasons are…
Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read
