About & Methodology
Global Gold Prices (GGP) is an independent reference for the gold price: the live spot price, charts back to 1968, converters and calculators for weight, karat and currency, gold news, central-bank buying and gold ETFs. Everything here is information, not investment advice. This page explains where each number comes from, so you can judge how far to rely on it.
Where each number comes from
| Data | Source | How it is kept current |
|---|---|---|
| Live gold price and the 1D / 5D charts | Aggregated spot quote from several providers | Read about once a minute while the market is open. It is not the LBMA benchmark. |
| Daily gold history, April 1968 onward | LBMA-referenced daily closes | Over 21,000 daily closes, checked against an independent dataset. The newest day is added from the live feed. |
| Exchange rates (ten currencies) | open.er-api.com | Checked every 6 hours; the source publishes new rates once a day. |
| S&P 500 and Bitcoin (comparison pages) | Yahoo Finance daily closes | S&P 500 from 2004, Bitcoin from 17 September 2014. Refreshed every 12 hours. |
| US inflation (comparison pages) | US CPI (series CPIAUCNS) from FRED | Rebased so January 2004 = 100 and interpolated between the monthly releases. Refreshed daily; CPI itself is published monthly. |
| News wire | Headlines from Investing.com and Yahoo Finance, filtered for gold | Checked every 15 minutes. GGP's own stories and analysis are written separately and filed to desks. |
| Central-bank gold and gold ETFs | Published country and fund figures | Each row carries its own “as of” date. Countries report on their own schedules, so dates differ. |
How a trading day and “Today” are defined
Spot gold trades around the clock from Sunday evening to Friday evening, with a one-hour break each weekday. GGP ends a trading day at 17:30 New York time, in the middle of that break. The 1D and 5D charts, the “Today” change and each daily close all use that same boundary, so they always agree: today’s change is measured from the previous trading day’s close, the point the 1D chart starts from. See gold market sessions for the live open and close times.
Conversions and prices by karat
One troy ounce is 31.1034768 grams. A karat is a fraction of 24: 24K is pure gold and is priced at the spot price, 18K is 75% of it, and so on. Prices in other currencies are the US-dollar spot price multiplied by the latest exchange rate. These are metal values only: jewellery and coins add making charges, dealer premiums and tax, so a shop price is higher.
Limits worth knowing
- Prices can differ slightly between providers and can pause briefly.
- Market hours and countdowns are the usual hours; public holidays and shortened days are not included.
- Calculators do arithmetic on past prices. They are not forecasts, and they leave out dealer spreads and tax.