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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…

Tomas Herrera · 20 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

A doré bar arrives at 85 per cent purity and leaves at 99.99. Between those two numbers sit chlorine gas, aqua regia, an electrolytic cell and a chain of custody that is now as valuable as the…

Tomas Herrera · 12 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…. · Scrap 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. · H…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…ay for a coin higher than the spot price? Because spot is a wholesale price for 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 st…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…. On paper, it is the best deposit on the planet. · Why the best deposit on the planet is barely being mined · A mining company deals with one hole in the ground. It builds a road to it once, a plant beside it once, and then runs material from a known coordinate for twenty years.…

Tomas Herrera · 21 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…ses. It rarely makes news, and it is the reason a spot price in London can diverge from a bar in New York. · Allocated custody means specific numbered bars belong to you; unallocated means you are a creditor of the bank, and the difference only becomes visible in a crisis. · A ba…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…carry different custody and counterparty terms. · A physically backed ETF holds allocated bars in a custodian vault, 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,…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…ior. · Ultrasonic velocity testing is the standard front-line defence against core-filled bars, because sound travels through tungsten far faster than through gold. · For coins, precise dimensional gauging is unusually powerful: the mint's tolerances are tighter than a counterfei…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…ured, 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 green ligh…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…ved between anonymous compartments by a handful of porters who never touch the metal with bare hands. This is how sovereign gold is actually stored, audited and, occasionally, brought home. · The Bank of England holds roughly 400,000 bars for around 100 account holders, most of t…

Ingrid Sørensen · 21 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. · Jewellery is roughly half of annual gold demand, and the majority of it is…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…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 accredita…

Yusuf Demir · 20 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…sale settlement. A loco London price is a price for metal deliverable there, which is why bars in that system carry a liquidity premium. · Does repatriation affect the gold price? Not directly, since ownership does not change. The indirect effect is on the free float: metal moved…

Ingrid Sørensen · 13 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…attempt it are genuinely dangerous. · Does a higher gold price reduce electronics demand? Barely, in the short run. Gold is a rounding error in a device's cost structure, so a designer will not redesign a package to save two dollars. Sustained high prices do accelerate longer-ter…

Tomas Herrera · 15 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…ibility ended official convertibility but not gold's role as a reserve asset. · Keynes's 'barbarous relic' critique was an argument against subordinating employment to mine output, not a dismissal of gold as a store of value. · Gold rushes and reserve accumulation are two sides o…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…bsurd — one gram drawn into three kilometres of wire. Inside a trade where the tools have barely changed and the hands are irreplaceable. · Pure gold is too soft for most wear; alloying trades purity for hardness and colour. · Karat is a fraction out of 24 — 18k is 75 per cent go…

Yusuf Demir · 11 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…rs 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 skin, so none o…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…en Earth formed sank into the core with the iron; the gold we mine arrived later, in a bombardment known as the late veneer. · Ore is not made by geology delivering gold to one place but by hot water dissolving trace gold from enormous volumes of rock and dropping it in a narrow…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…0 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 is more procedu…

Ingrid Sørensen · 17 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…ing arcs, everything laid out on grey conservation foam with numbered markers and a scale bar. The image implies a story: someone hid this, in a hurry, because something was coming. That story is sometimes right. The difficulty is that the metal is silent on the point, and almost…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…d, or synthetic. Read the prospectus, not the ticker. · Physical dealing: coins and small bars carry dealer spreads, assay risk, counterfeit risk, storage cost and, in some jurisdictions, sales tax. The 'spot price' is not the price at which a retail buyer transacts. · Fraud: pre…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…sensitive material so 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 reco…

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…n before it. Nine grams a tonne was, not so many decades ago, considered a mediocre grade barely worth developing. Today, a mine averaging even half of that, worked at industrial scale with modern processing technology, can be a perfectly viable and profitable operation — which t…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…bel does and does not tell you A 'responsibly sourced' claim on a piece of jewellery or a bar most often means the material passed through an audited chain from a specific certified site or pool of sites — not that all artisanal gold everywhere meets that standard, and not that t…

Amara Okonjo · 12 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 longest…

Tomas Herrera · 17 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 · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…own the page they got. We use it editorially: to decide whether a fourteen-minute read on refining chemistry earns its length, and which sections deserve more commissioning budget. It is configured for aggregate reporting, without cross-site tracking or advertising profiles, and…