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26 results for “karat vs fineness”
Science · 9 August 2026
The Metallurgy of Karat
…u own that is gold is a designed alloy — and the design is where the engineering lives. · Karat is a fraction, not a quality grade: 24 parts by mass, so 18k is 75.0% gold and 9k is 37.5%. · Pure gold measures roughly 25 HV on the Vickers scale — softer than a fingernail can dent…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Craft · 22 July 2026
Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold
…terpiece of institutional design — and it is being quietly eroded. · A hallmark certifies fineness verified by an independent third party — not weight, value, age or craftsmanship. · Fire assay remains the referee method; XRF is fast and non-destructive but reads only the surface…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Craft · 3 August 2026
The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor
…y is roughly half of annual gold demand, and the majority of it is bought in Asia. · High-karat jewellery in India and China functions as savings with a wearable form factor, not as fashion. · Physical buyers are contrarian: demand strengthens on price weakness and stalls on rall…
Yusuf Demir · 15 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…eference method; every non-destructive technique is a proxy calibrated against it. · Underkarated jewellery, not exotic tungsten-cored bars, is the fraud that costs the industry the most money overall, because it is quiet, distributed across thousands of small items, and invisibl…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Craft · 5 June 2026
The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't
…· 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 gold by mass. · Ancient techniques such as granulation and repoussé remain hand skills with no full machine equivalent. · CAD and casting h…
Yusuf Demir · 16 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
…ds to price faster than mine output can. · 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 buy…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Markets · 8 August 2026
Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices
…· The London market clears in 400-ounce bars of variable weight, refined to a minimum 995 fineness. Comex futures deliver against 100-ounce bars and kilobars. Most Asian markets, and the retail demand behind them, want kilobars at 9999 fineness. These are not interchangeable obje…
Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…le market. · Provenance documentation now determines a bar's marketability as much as its fineness. · Recycled scrap is a large and often more profitable feedstock than mined doré, but it demands heavier sorting and compliance work before it ever reaches the furnace. · The metall…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
Markets · 17 August 2026
Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars
…An unallocated balance is a bank's promise to deliver a stated quantity of gold of stated fineness. It is not a bailment. The metal backing that promise is not segregated, not numbered, and not necessarily sitting still — the bank may lease it, use it to settle other obligations,…
Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
…st be shipped to an accredited refinery, assayed precisely and re-refined to a guaranteed fineness before it can enter the fungible bullion market. · What does Good Delivery status actually certify? Good Delivery is a list, maintained by the London Bullion Market Association, of…
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 · 20 min read
Markets · 11 September 2026
The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold
…York and Paris to Frankfurt, melting and recasting every returned bar to check weight and fineness. The exercise was completed ahead of schedule and is the closest thing to a full external audit any large holder has conducted and described publicly. · Does the audit gap affect th…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 18 August 2026
The Vault Beneath the City
…armarking. An earmarked bar is identified by a unique serial number, a refiner's stamp, a fineness assay and a weight, and it is allocated in the vault's records to one specific owner. It sits physically in a caged compartment assigned to that owner, stacked on wooden pallets in…
Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read
Markets · 20 June 2026
Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation
…able to routine in about a decade. · ~12.4 kg Weight of a Good Delivery bar 995.0 Minimum fineness for Good Delivery 400 oz Nominal bar size, wholesale market Nobody's liability Gold's defining reserve property · The costs nobody advertises · Repatriation is not free, and the bil…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
…evices, per kilogram Lower Typical life-cycle emissions per gram, formal e-waste recovery vs primary mining Reversed That comparison's direction once informal, unpermitted recovery is substituted
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Markets · 6 August 2026
Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again
…t the metal moving. Refining and upgrading — converting existing holdings of older, lower-fineness bars into current Good Delivery specification so they are tradeable without assay disputes. · Why the reported numbers lag Official reserve statistics are self-reported, published w…
Ingrid Sørensen · 14 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 · 16 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
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 · 8 August 2026
The Metal That Went Medical
Divide gold finely enough and it stops being gold-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…
Amara Okonjo · 19 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
Markets · 8 September 2026
The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do
For two decades the gold price could be read off an inflation-linked bond screen. Then, somewhere after 2022, the relationship stopped behaving — and the argument about why has become the most consequ…
Ingrid Sørensen · 25 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
Markets · 2 August 2026
Who Actually Sets the Gold Price
There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
