Paper Gold Trading
By GCRU Gold News on Wednesday, October 28 2015, 04:12 - Permalink
The volume traded during one day on the London Gold Market is thus at least 88% of a whole year’s gold mining production. Assuming about 250 trading days in a year, the volume traded solely on the London Gold Market is about 22,000% higher than the world’s annual mining production. And this is a conservative estimation.
The clearing and turnover volumes are nothing short of shocking.
As the London Gold Market, together with the New York market, is the global price discovery market for gold, it’s apparent that physical supply and demand of gold has nothing to do with the price of gold.
Which do you think carries a higher weight when it comes to influencing the price of gold; An increase or decrease of 10 tons of physical gold demand for the Indian wedding season in a quarter, or the 170,195 tons of paper gold changing ownership each quarter in the London Gold Market?
Factors like Indian wedding demand are often cited by media as a cause of price movements, whereas the London Gold Market volumes are never mentioned. Whether demand is high during the Indian wedding season or not does not matter one ounce in terms of price fluctuations. It totally misses the point as the London Gold Market, together with the US/New York market, dominates price discovery.
Physical demand matters in stressing and ultimately breaking the market structure but it does not matter for the (paper) price of gold today. The fundamentals for physical gold are completely separated from the paper price of gold. The paper price of gold has nothing to do with the physical market whatsoever.
The price for physical bullion products is never traded at parity with the paper price. There is always a price premium. When demand for physical gold is increasing, as we have seen over the last couple of months, price premiums are shooting up, diverging the physical price from the paper price even further.
