From the London Benchmark to Your Jeweller's Window
The price in a shop in Amman started as a number set in London and traded in Chicago. The full chain — benchmark, futures, local premium, exchange rate, making charge — and where each link adds or subtracts.
When a jeweller in Amman, Casablanca or Karachi writes today's gram price on the board, he is at the end of a chain that began thousands of kilometres away. Understanding that chain tells you which parts of the price are fixed by the world and which are negotiable in the room — and that distinction is worth money.
Link 1: the benchmark
Gold's reference price is set in London, the centre of the physical bullion trade for more than a century. Twice each business day, at 10:30 and 15:00 London time, an electronic auction run under the LBMA establishes a settlement price in dollars per troy ounce — the "London fix," now formally the LBMA Gold Price.
Two things about that unit matter downstream:
- A troy ounce is 31.1035 grams, not the 28.35 g of an ordinary ounce. Every gram price you ever see is a division by 31.1035.
- The quote is in dollars. Gold's world price is a dollar price. Everything else is a conversion.
The fix is a benchmark, used for contracts and valuations. It is not the price at every moment.
Link 2: continuous trading
Between the fixes, gold trades continuously — over-the-counter in London, and as futures on COMEX in New York, alongside Shanghai and other centres. This is what produces the number that moves every few seconds, the spot price.
Spot and futures differ slightly and predictably. A futures contract for delivery in three months costs a little more than metal today, because someone must finance and store the metal in the meantime. That gap is normal market structure, not a discrepancy.
This site's live spot figure is a median of PAXG/USD across Binance, Coinbase and Kraken — PAXG being a token backed one-to-one by allocated London bullion. Taking the median of three venues rather than one price keeps a single exchange's glitch from moving the number. The daily close figures come from COMEX futures.
Link 3: the local physical premium
Here the world price stops being the whole story. Physical gold in Dubai, Istanbul or Cairo does not trade at exactly the London price, because getting real metal into a real vault in a real city costs money and takes time.
The local premium reflects:
- Import and logistics — freight, insurance, security.
- Duties and taxes — India's import duty is the well-known case; VAT treatment differs sharply across the region.
- Local supply and demand — a wedding season or a festival can push the local premium up for weeks.
- Refining to local standards — the karat a market actually buys. A country that wants 21K needs metal alloyed to 21K.
In a calm market this premium is small. During a currency crisis or a buying panic it can widen dramatically, which is why the local price sometimes moves when the world price has not.
Link 4: the exchange rate
Now the dollar price becomes a local price, and this link is the one that dominates in much of our coverage area. If your currency falls 10% against the dollar and gold does not move at all in dollars, gold rises 10% in your currency.
For countries with a dollar peg — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain — this link is nearly invisible, because the rate barely moves. For Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon it frequently matters more than the world gold price itself. And where a country has more than one exchange rate in practice, which rate the shop uses changes the answer; we cover that in a separate guide.
Link 5: the shop
Finally the metal becomes an object with a price tag. The shop adds:
- the making charge, covering fabrication and its own margin,
- the cost of stones, if any,
- and its retail overhead.
This is the only link in the entire chain where the number is genuinely up for discussion. Nobody behind the counter sets the London price, the COMEX spread, the import duty or the exchange rate. They do set the making charge.
Reading the chain backwards
That is the practical payoff. When a price feels wrong, work up the chain and ask which link explains it:
| What you notice | Which link |
|---|---|
| Price moved and world gold did not | Exchange rate, or local premium |
| Two shops on the same street differ | Making charge and retail margin |
| Your country is dearer than the neighbour | Duty, tax, local premium |
| The board changed twice today | Spot, moving continuously |
| Quoted gram price ≠ ounce ÷ 31.1035 × purity | Premium and margin, by definition |
The last row is the most useful check you can run. Take the day's ounce price, divide by 31.1035, multiply by the purity of the karat in question — 0.999, 0.916, 0.875, 0.750 — and you have the pure metal value of a gram. Everything above that number is the local chain, and you now know what each part of it is for.
Every country page on this site shows exactly that calculation, live, in the local currency.
