How gold and silver pricing actually works

The spot price you see quoted on television is the price of unfabricated metal traded in large contracts. It is not the price of a finished coin or bar, and no one anywhere sells you a one-ounce American Eagle at spot — not a dealer, not a distributor, not the United States Mint.

Between spot and a coin in your hand sits refining, minting, quality control, packaging, insured freight, authentication, inventory risk, and a dealer who has to hold that product until you want it. That distance is the premium. It exists on every physical ounce ever sold.

Think about a barrel of oil. The barrel trades around seventy or eighty dollars. Nobody in California pumps diesel at that price — you pay well over seven dollars a gallon at the pump, which works out to hundreds of dollars a barrel by the time it is refined, trucked, taxed, and dispensed into your tank. That is not a scandal; it is what it costs to turn a commodity into a finished product you can actually use. Metals work the same way. The honest question is never whether there is a premium. It is whether the premium is reasonable.

There is nothing mysterious about our business. We buy physical metal through wholesale accounts and we sell it to our clients. We make our margin on the product, disclosed in writing, and that is the whole arrangement. We are not paid to move you between funds, we do not earn a trailing commission on your balance, and we do not need you to trade to get paid.

Because we buy at volume through carefully built wholesale accounts, the majority of the time we can deliver a better all-in number than the same client could get on their own, one coin at a time, at retail. That is the practical value of a supply chain: our clients are on the buying side of it.

We also do the work. Paperwork, custodian coordination, depository setup, titling, insured shipping, and follow-through are handled end to end. That saves time, and time is the expense people forget to count.

You will see the premium, the spread, shipping and insurance, and any custodian or depository fees before you commit to anything. If a line item is unclear, we will explain it on one page of arithmetic.

In many cases we subsidize or waive fees outright, particularly where a client is moving a meaningful position or has asked us to handle several pieces of their situation at once. The more of the work we are doing, the less the fee load makes sense to us — but we tell you what the fees are either way. Waived is not the same as hidden.

What we will not do is price like Wall Street. When a shortage appears in some corner of the market, there are firms that treat scarcity as a license to take enormous net margins on a frightened buyer. Some mints and marketers do the same with limited-edition products. We think that is highway robbery, and we have deliberately built our sourcing so that we never have to reach for it.

A collector buying a series for the pleasure of owning it should be priced and advised differently from a saver setting aside a monthly ounce, and both differently from an investor positioning a retirement account for return.

Most of our clients are investors. For them, the product mix is chosen to serve the goal: liquidity when they want out, the lowest sensible premium for the amount of metal owned, recognized sovereign or hallmarked product that any dealer in the country will bid on, and an allocation that fits the rest of the balance sheet.

That is where experience earns its keep. Choosing the asset that achieves the stated goal — rather than the asset that pays the salesperson best — is the entire job. If you tell us what you are trying to accomplish, we will tell you which products serve it and which ones do not, including when the answer is a plain bar instead of something beautiful.

A price is only half a price if you do not know what the exit looks like. Dealers bid below spot and offer above it; the distance between those two numbers is the spread, and it is the honest cost of liquidity in any physical market.

We will quote you the current bid on what you own at any time, and we tell clients what the spread looks like on a product before they buy it, because a low-premium recognized coin is far easier to sell well than an exclusive product with a story attached.

What the market does between your purchase and your sale is not ours to control or promise. What we can promise is that you will know how the mechanics work before you decide.