Search the whole magazine.

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 time…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

…nest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices until the mine is already exhausted. · The industry's headline cost figure, all-in sustaining cost, still excludes major items such as exploration for new r…

Amara Okonjo · 18 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. ·…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…nce stays stable for decades. · Substitution is real and mostly already happened — copper bonding wire displaced gold across high-volume packaging years ago. · Industrial demand is price-inelastic in the short run because gold is a tiny fraction of a device's bill of materials. ·…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

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

…ud waiting to be discovered. It is the kind of claim that is easy to shout and hard to examine, because it treats a dozen unlike instruments as one thing. A futures contract, an unallocated account at a clearing bank, a share in a physically backed fund and a gold certificate fro…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

…tunity cost rises when safe assets pay more. When inflation-adjusted yields on government bonds climb, holding gold instead of those bonds costs more in forgone income, which tends to weigh on demand. The relationship is a strong tendency rather than a law, and it breaks down dur…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 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 consequential debate in the metal's market. · Gold pays no coupon,…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…ross Europe. The alloy is an engineering decision, and the fineness mark is the honest disclosure of it. · 999.9 Four-nines fineness — refining's practical ceiling 750 18 karat — the standard fine jewellery alloy 585 14 karat — the durable everyday standard 375 9 karat — legal as…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

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

…y richer than gold ore? By concentration, frequently yes. Modern underground ore is often mined at grades measured in single-digit grams of gold per tonne, while sorted, high-grade circuit boards can run into the hundreds of grams per tonne. What e-waste lacks is a deposit: the m…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

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…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…bars trade without re-assay in the wholesale 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 befor…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

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

…world's governments and central banks say they hold — about a fifth of all the gold ever mined, worth at current prices in the region of three trillion dollars. The figure appears in every annual demand report, every central bank speech, every chart of official-sector buying. It…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

Between the vault and the buyer sits an industry of armoured vehicles, sealed cargo, bonded warehouses and insurance clauses. 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 bar…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…· 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 of the same demand story: private discovery in the nineteenth century, official…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

…— but each shifts risk rather than eliminating it. · Traceability schemes work only where miners can actually access a legal buyer at a fair price. · Women make up a substantial share of the artisanal workforce, concentrated in processing roles that carry their own distinct mercu…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…no interest? Because a reserve portfolio is insurance, not an income strategy. Government bonds pay a yield but are somebody else's liability and can be frozen, redenominated or defaulted on. Gold pays nothing and cannot be created by anyone, which is exactly the property a reser…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…a quarter to a third of annual gold demand, and its volume responds 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 la…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

…t all of the gold present when 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…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

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

…arked 750. The remaining quarter is alloying metal, usually copper and silver, which determines hardness and colour. · Why is pure gold rarely used in jewellery? At 24k gold is soft enough to be marked by a fingernail's pressure over time and deforms out of shape in daily wear. A…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

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

…t; logistics capacity into the subcontinent is booked against it; and a monsoon that determines the rural harvest determines, with a lag of a few months, how much of the wedding-season buying actually materialises in the villages where a large share of it happens. · ~50% Share of…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…rces · The confidentiality of a source who has been promised it is absolute. We resist disclosure demands by every lawful means available, and we design our handling of sensitive material so that there is as little to disclose as possible. Whistleblowers in refining, mining and b…

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

…dicators that a hoard was given rather than hidden. · Can you tell where ancient gold was mined? Only approximately. Trace-element profiles and lead isotope ratios can be compared with ore-body signatures, and the technique works best on objects made from a single, freshly refine…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…as labels and both are cheaper per unit. Gold persists because of surface chemistry. The bond between sulphur and a gold surface is strong, forms spontaneously from solution, and orients molecules predictably — which means any biological molecule that can be given a thiol group…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…ublication printed on the page. Markets move; official statistics are revised; company disclosures are restated. We do not retrospectively update figures inside a published article, because doing so would falsify the record. Where a revision matters, we append a dated update note…

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…ains everything about how authentication has developed. Each defence closed a route; each closure pushed forgers towards a harder and more expensive one. The current state of play is an equilibrium in which sophisticated fakes are technically possible and economically marginal. ·…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…nomic critique of holding large non-yielding gold reserves is straightforward: a treasury bond pays interest, a bank deposit pays interest, and gold pays nothing while costing money to store and insure. Critics of official-sector gold buying — and there is a respectable body of c…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…nly reveals itself halfway through the final polish. · These are the properties that determine whether a design can be executed at all, and they are why workshops develop loyalties to particular alloy suppliers that outsiders find inexplicable. Two 18k yellows with identical assa…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…ld is soft, bars stacked directly on top of one another for decades can actually begin to bond at a microscopic level, requiring a practiced technique to separate them without scuffing the refiner’s stamp. The specialized trolleys used to move these pallets are engineered with lo…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…ritten out in prose because a cookie inventory that only a developer can read is not a disclosure. Every item listed is first-party unless the row says otherwise. · Session identifier — strictly necessary, no personal data, cleared when you close the browser tab. It exists so tha…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Privacy Policy

…GoldMagazine is an independent editorial publication reporting on gold — its markets, its mines, its metallurgy and the people who work it. This Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data collected through this website, including every article page, the archive, and any…