Gold price and silver market data

Method

How these pages are built

Every figure on every tracker is written into the page at build time rather than fetched by the browser afterwards, which sounds like an implementation detail and is actually the whole argument. Most tracker pages in this category render an empty shell and fill it in with JavaScript. The crawlers that increasingly answer these questions on a reader's behalf, GPTBot and ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot among them, then read a loading state where the number should be.

The charts work the same way, drawn on the server as plain SVG. The axis labels, the annotations and a written description of the shape are all present before any script runs. Interactivity is added afterwards for the human reader, so nothing that carries information ever sits behind hydration.

Three rules follow from that, and they are worth stating because they constrain what we can publish. Every date on a number is the date the source reported, never the date the page was built. Every claim in the prose is computed from the same data that draws the chart, and a test asserts that the two agree. That is what stops the writing drifting away from the numbers as each series updates. Where a figure is stale, the page says so and names the month it came from instead of implying it is current.

Read this first

What the spot price is not

The spot price on this page is the wholesale price of an unallocated bullion contract, and it is not the price at which anybody sells you a coin. What a dealer quotes is spot plus a premium over spot covering minting, distribution and their own margin. The CFTC's advisory on physical metals says some fraudulent dealers have charged spreads of more than 300 percent while other dealers may charge less than 20 percent, and it tells buyers to get every fee, commission and the agreed price in writing before signing.

The gap matters most inside a gold IRA, where the metal is bought once and held for years. A premium paid on the way in is locked into the position rather than traded away. A reader comparing a dealer quote against the number at the top of this page is doing the right arithmetic, and the difference between the two is the figure worth negotiating over.

None of these trackers price a gold ETF or a mining stock, both of which track the metal without holding it and carry their own costs. Everything here is the metal itself, at the London fix or at live spot. That is the right benchmark when the thing being bought is physical bullion sitting in a depository.

Provenance

Where the data comes from

Every series comes from the institution that published it, with no data aggregator sitting in between. Any figure here can be traced back to the original record and checked.