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Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…livery period and meet the exchange's requirements, yes — you receive a warrant for a 100-ounce or kilobar lot in an approved depository. In practice almost nobody does. Delivery involves full contract value, storage fees and a bar you cannot resell at spot without re-entering th…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

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 · 15 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…— matters so much to the owner. · Why did Germany repatriate its gold? The Bundesbank announced in 2013 that it would bring home 674 tonnes held in New York and Paris by 2020, completing the move three years early in 2017. Officially the plan was framed around building trust wit…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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 · 16 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 · 19 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 · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…d karat rather than a measured one. · Benchmark price — the reference for pure metal, per troy ounce or per gram, before anything is subtracted. Fineness adjustment — 9-karat material is 37.5 percent gold, 18-karat is 75 percent, 22-karat is 91.6 percent; stones, clasps and sprin…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 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. · Why does it take so long to build a new gold mine? Resource definition drilling, feasibility studies, environment…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

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

…ning, which can detect a non-gold core — a tungsten-filled bar, for instance — without destroying the sample. Neither method, applied to a five per cent sample, guarantees that a single doctored bar elsewhere in the holding would be caught. Confidence, not certainty, is what a sa…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 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 · 14 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 until the mine is already e…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…y adding base metal at home changes the composition unevenly, will not pass assay, and destroys any hallmark already on the piece. Karat conversion is a refiner's job, done by melting, assaying and re-alloying from scratch, then resubmitting for a fresh hallmark. · Does higher ka…

Tomas Herrera · 17 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 · 19 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…once by accretion and never replenished — is what tells explorers that every discoverable ounce is the product of subsequent concentration, not of some deeper reservoir waiting to be tapped by drilling further. · That reframes the entire economics of mineral exploration. A compan…

Tomas Herrera · 17 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

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 · 16 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. · How common is underkarated jew…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

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

…years on end, which fueled a massive bull market in gold that took the metal from $35 an ounce to a peak of $850 in 1980. The 1970s taught a generation of investors that gold is the ultimate hedge against a central bank that has lost control. It was only when Paul Volcker pushed…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

…those goals at the design stage. · How does urban mining compare with mining on cost per ounce? It varies hugely by feedstock quality and cannot be reduced to one figure. High-grade sorted server and telecom scrap can be cheaper to process per ounce than a marginal underground d…

Tomas Herrera · 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 · 15 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…iving a bar would need to independently re-assay it before accepting it at face value, destroying the speed and low cost that make wholesale gold trading possible. The List substitutes one round of rigorous, ongoing institutional verification for millions of redundant private one…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…ite is not a survey but a spread: the local price versus the London benchmark, quoted per ounce, as a premium or a discount. Positive means importers are competing for metal; negative means the domestic market is oversupplied and is being cleared by recycled scrap and unofficial…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…heir mandates without causing disorderly market moves. If a major central bank were to announce a large-scale buying programme in advance, the resulting price spike would make their own objective harder to achieve. Consequently, the official sector will likely remain the most sig…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 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 · 16 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

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