Stats › Intraday and market microstructure › Gold auction
The London gold auction
Twice a day, at 10:30 and 15:00 London time, an electronic auction runs for about as long as it takes to make a coffee, and the number that comes out of it is the price of gold. Not a price. The price. Central banks reference it, mining contracts settle against it, and the largest gold ETF in the world strikes its net asset value off the afternoon one.
Until March 2015 that number was agreed by five banks on a conference call. It is now run by ICE Benchmark Administration on an auction platform, under the London Bullion Market Association's ownership of the benchmark name. What forced the change was a decade of suspicion, one regulatory finding and a very large fine.
I put this page together because the mechanics are published, in detail, by the administrator, and almost nobody who quotes the gold price has read them. Everything below comes from ICE, the LBMA, the FCA or a named academic paper. Where I could not find a figure, I say so rather than filling the gap.
The LBMA Gold Price is set in a round by round auction at 10:30 and 15:00 London, in 30 second rounds, ending when net buying and selling are within 10,000 oz. Any leftover imbalance is shared equally between direct participants whether they traded or not. ICE lists 15 direct participants in gold and 14 in silver, against six at the 2015 launch and four before ICE took over. The old London Gold Fix started on 12 Sep 1919 at about $20.67 an ounce and ended on 19 Mar 2015. The FCA fined Barclays £26,033,500 in May 2014 over failings surrounding it, and a US class action covering 1 Jan 2004 to 30 Jun 2013 settled for $152m.
Members only
The rest of this page is for members
Below this point there are 8 sections, 2 tables and 9 named sources, roughly 2750 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.