The LBMA trade repository or reporting hub, named

, into which LBMA member firms report their trade data, has a huge amount of trade data that the LBMA could report to the market if it so chose and wished to do so in the interests of market fairness and efficiency. There could be real trade reporting which as a reminder under MIFID takes the form of reporting “basic details of trades almost immediately, so that the information can be circulated in the market, to improve transparency of pricing”.

There could be reporting by client type, such as miners, refiners, central banks, buyside institutions, banks etc, and reporting by trade rationale, e.g. ETF trades interbank trades, exchange for physicals, speculative trading, central bank gold deposits, physical consignment trades etc. In fact the options are practically endless for proper trade reporting when all of the data is in a database, as it is in the LBMA-i reporting hub.

But the LBMA has chosen not to provide any trade reporting at all, and the UK financial authorities have chosen to look the other way. The London gold and silver markets will therefore continue to operate in opacity and with a lack of market efficiency that proper trade reporting would have gone someway to improve.