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Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…e. · Physical gold moves mostly as belly cargo on scheduled passenger flights, which ties bullion logistics to airline capacity. · Bar formats differ between markets — 400 oz in London, kilobars in Asia — so relocating metal often means re-casting it, not just flying it. · When f…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…arply in market share over the past decade. · Good Delivery status, awarded by the London Bullion Market Association, is a reputational credential as much as a technical one, and losing it can end a refinery's ability to sell into the wholesale market overnight. · Responsible-sou…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…d international institutions that pay to store gold in London because of its deep, liquid bullion market. The UK's own reserves, managed through the Treasury's Exchange Equalisation Account, form a much smaller share of the total and were themselves controversially reduced in the…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…, 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, an unsecured claim on the bank rather than ownership of metal. · Fewer than two per cent of COMEX gold futures cont…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

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

…l interest rate. For an entire generation of market participants, this was the bedrock of bullion analysis, providing a clear and reliable signal in an otherwise noisy financial landscape. · That slide is now out of date. Between 2022 and the middle of this decade real yields cli…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…t the Bank of England or the New York Fed could be lent, swapped or sold without physical transport, and during the Cold War it was safer outside the likely path of an invasion. · What does 'loco London' mean? It designates gold held in accredited London vaults, the default locat…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…or 400-ounce bars that never leave a vault. A retail coin adds refining, minting, insured transport, dealer inventory cost, VAT or sales tax where applicable, and a margin. On small denominations that stack can be a double-digit percentage of the metal value. · What is the EFP an…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…n. Assurance therefore has to travel as paperwork alongside the metal: mine certificates, transport records, counterparty due diligence and audit. Refiners now maintain compliance teams comparable in size to their metallurgical staff. · Recycling, which is most of the business ·…

Tomas Herrera · 19 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 less about inflation than about the plumbing of s…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…old-coloured, 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 gr…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…gold ±0.01 mm Dimensional tolerance a modern mint holds · Coins are a different problem · Bullion coins are, counter-intuitively, harder to counterfeit convincingly than bars, and the reason is manufacturing tolerance. A sovereign mint strikes to specifications published to a hun…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

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

…er's behalf — because it is out on lease or pledged in a swap. Central banks lend gold to bullion banks to earn a yield; bullion banks sell it and deliver later; the gold finances refineries, jewellery manufacturers and miners' hedging programmes in between. IMF reporting guidanc…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…is priced off spot, adjusted for assayed fineness, then discounted for testing, refining, transport and each intermediary's margin. · High-street payouts commonly land well below spot for the contained gold; specialist refiners buying in volume pay far closer to it. · Handheld XR…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…a long-run store of value and a poor short-run investment simultaneously. · No cash flow: bullion pays no coupon and no dividend. Its return depends wholly on the price another buyer will pay, and holding it carries storage, insurance and opportunity costs. · Currency effects: go…

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…er than 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 a…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…swarf, electronic waste and dental gold, melted down, assayed and returned to 999.9 fine bullion that is chemically indistinguishable from any other source. For the goldsmith this changes almost nothing about how the metal behaves under a hammer or a torch; refined gold has no m…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…agazine about gold · Hoards are the deepest available data on how societies actually held bullion before there were institutions to hold it for them. Read carefully, they tell us about denomination structure, about how far coins travelled, about the relationship between object we…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…ndent testing is most worth requesting. · Investment purity versus jewellery purity · The bullion market and the jewellery trade use the word 'gold' to mean two different design problems, and buyers frequently import the wrong intuition from one to the other. A 400-ounce Good Del…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

…was the International Cyanide Management Code, a voluntary certification scheme covering transport, storage, dosing, monitoring and decommissioning, audited by third parties. Voluntary schemes have obvious limits, but the Code did standardise practice at signatory operations in…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…d to tailings already contaminated with mercury, it can mobilise that mercury into a more transportable form. · Gravity first: it is the only intervention with no toxic downside and immediate revenue benefit. Retorts as a bridge: a simple condenser recaptures much of the mercury…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…d in a single handset is worth a small fraction of what it costs to individually collect, transport, store and manually disassemble that handset. Value appears only at scale and only when the whole device is treated as a bundle of materials — copper, palladium, silver, tin, alumi…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

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

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

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

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 · 15 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 · 17 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…o that there is as little to disclose as possible. Whistleblowers in refining, mining and bullion banking are encouraged to make contact through channels they control, from equipment that is not their employer's. · Practically, that means we keep contact records apart from publis…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Terms of Use

…s beyond the sum invested, mining equities carry operational and jurisdictional risk that bullion does not, and past performance is never a reliable indicator of future results. Take independent, regulated advice before acting. · 6. Accuracy and availability · We report carefully…