Methodology — How we calculate gold prices
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Every number on this site is derived from observable, third-party market data. Below is exactly how it is sourced, transformed and presented.
Spot gold (XAU/USD)
Spot gold is computed as the per-tick median of three WebSocket feeds: Binance PAXG/USDT, Coinbase PAXG-USD, and Kraken PAXG/USD. PAX Gold (PAXG) is an ERC-20 token backed 1:1 by physical 1 oz London Good Delivery gold bars held in Brink's vaults and audited monthly by Withum. PAXG trades within a few cents of the LBMA spot benchmark. Using the median of three venues prevents single-exchange outliers from contaminating the displayed price.
Karat prices (24K, 21K, 18K, 14K)
Karat prices per gram are computed as: spot_per_gram × purity_ratio, where purity ratios are 99.9% (24K), 87.5% (21K), 75% (18K), 58.3% (14K) per the World Gold Council. No retailer premium, refining loss or VAT is added — these are pure spot equivalents. Local jewellery shops will quote a premium above this number.
FX rates
FX conversion to JOD, SAR, AED, EGP and 36 other currencies uses the open-source fawazahmed0/currency-api feed, refreshed once per day from central-bank mid-market rates. We do not apply a retail spread — confirm at-the-counter rates with your bank.
Silver, platinum, palladium
Silver (XAG), platinum (XPT) and palladium (XPD) spot prices update once per minute via STOOQ aggregated feeds (FOREXCOM symbols). These are not WebSocket-streamed because the underlying markets are less liquid than gold; minute-cadence is sufficient.
Historical data
Historical daily OHLC for gold is sourced from Yahoo Finance via query1.finance.yahoo.com for the GC=F (COMEX gold futures) and XAU=X tickers. Data is cached for 24 hours.
Known limitations
1) PAXG/USD is a proxy for LBMA spot — it correlates extremely tightly but is not the LBMA fix. 2) FX rates are mid-market — your bank's retail rate will differ by 0.5–3%. 3) Karat prices exclude retailer premium, refining loss and VAT/tax. 4) Crypto-coin pricing on /cryptocurrency/* uses CoinGecko cached at 5-minute intervals.
