How to Read a Jeweller's Daily Board

Walk into any gold souk and the first thing you see is a board — a whiteboard, an LED panel, or a printed sheet taped inside the glass. It is updated each morning and sometimes again during the day. Most customers glance at it, find one number, and stop. The board is telling you considerably more than that.

The two columns

The single most important feature of the board is that most karats carry two numbers, not one.

• The sell price (البيع) — what the shop sells to you at. Higher.
• The buy price (الشراء) — what the shop pays if you bring gold in. Lower.

The shop is on both sides of the market, and the gap between the columns is its margin on the metal. Read that gap first, before anything else. It tells you what a round trip through this particular shop costs you.

A narrow gap signals a high-turnover dealer competing on price. A wide gap signals the opposite. In most Arab markets a normal spread on plain 21K runs a few percent; when it is very wide, that is information.

Note that the buy column is for metal only. Bring in a worked piece and you are paid on the gold content — the craftsmanship does not appear in that column, ever.

The rows

Rows are karats, usually descending: 24, 22, 21, 18, sometimes 14. Each is a purity:

The prices should be proportional to purity. That is the check almost nobody performs, and it takes five seconds: 21K should be about 87.5 ÷ 99.9 = 87.6% of the 24K price. If the 24K gram is 300, the 21K gram should be near 263. If a row is meaningfully out of line with its purity, ask why — sometimes there is a good reason, such as the shop pricing a karat it rarely stocks, and sometimes there is not.

What the board does not tell you

Three costs sit outside it entirely, and they are where the money goes:

• Making charges. Not on the board, almost never posted, always negotiable. The board price is metal.
• Stones. Priced separately, and their weight is not gold.
• Tax. VAT treatment varies by country and is sometimes shown, sometimes added at the till.

This is why the board price and the till price differ, and why a customer who compares only board prices between two shops can still overpay at the cheaper-looking one.

When it was last updated

A board is a snapshot. Gold trades continuously, so a board written at 9 a.m. is stale by afternoon on a volatile day. Many shops update once daily and absorb intraday movement into their spread — which is a legitimate way to run a shop, and a reason the spread is not pure profit.

On a fast-moving day, ask when the board was set. Then check the live price yourself and you will know immediately whether the number in front of you is current.

The four questions

Standing at the counter, these turn the board into a decision:

1. "Is this price per gram, and for which karat?" Removes the most common misunderstanding before it starts.
2. "What is the making charge on this piece?" The board number plus this number is what you actually pay.
3. "When was the board last updated?" Tells you whether to trust it today.
4. "What would you buy this same piece back at?" The single most revealing question in the shop. It surfaces the real spread on a specific object, not the theoretical one on the board.

A shop that answers all four plainly is a shop you can deal with. Hesitation on the fourth is worth noticing.

Using the board with a live price in your pocket

The board is a local, once-a-day approximation of a number that moves every second. You can carry the real one. Open your country's page on this site, look at the live 24K and 21K gram price in your own currency, and compare.

You are not trying to catch the shop out — a retail price is legitimately above spot, for all the reasons in our guide on how the price reaches the shop. You are trying to know how far above, which is the only way to tell a fair board from a padded one.

Live per-gram prices for 24, 22, 21, 18 and 14 karat, in your currency, are at the top of every country page here.