April was second month this year where delivery notices exceeded registered gold at COMEX

According to the CFTC, the Atlanta-based exchange plans to introduce a 3-millisecond trading delay, one which it calls Passive Order Protection. What is even more interesting is where said delay will be implemented: according to the regulatory filing, the speed bump will be first used on exchange's gold and silver futures contracts "where the ICE currently does very little business", effectively confirming that the gold and silver futures market is where market manipulation by algos has been most rife (something which we already knew thanks to such chronic market manipulators as Deutsche Bank and UBS).

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.

The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) will begin publishing data on November 20 that will provide the most accurate picture yet of the size of London’s gold trade, its chief executive said on Monday.

The new LBMA figures will show the total trading activity of LBMA members which make up the bulk of the London market and are expected to be much larger than the clearing statistics.

In March of this year, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) released a series of short videos about various aspects of the London precious metals markets and the role the LBMA claims to plays in those markets.

It is the ‘Who we Are’ and ‘How the Market Works’ videos which are worth discussing in the context that neither answers the questions that their titles suggest.

The five banks that settle every transaction in London’s $6.8 trillion a year gold market are changing the rules of their clearing house to make it easier for newcomers to join.

The reform is part of a broad overhaul of institutions that underpin the world’s largest bullion trading center to make them more transparent after accusations of price manipulation by banks and traders and pressure from regulators.

The Moscow Exchange will launch deliverable futures for gold in 2018 in a move to further prop up bullion market liquidity, bourse chief executive Alexander Afanasiev said on Thursday.

These deliverable futures will be denominated in roubles and the weight will be measured in grams, said Igor Marich, who oversees the bourse’s money and derivatives market.

On 29 August, the London Metal Exchange (LME) began publication of a set of daily reference prices for gold and silver. These reference prices aim to capture and reflect paper gold and silver market prices as at 10:30 am, 12:00 midday, and 3:00 pm London time.

More important, the float the giant stockpile of gold that underlies trading is heavily concentrated in the city. More than 7,000 tons of gold and 32,000 tons of silver, collectively worth almost $320 billion, are stored in hidden vaults managed by the Bank of England, JPMorgan Chase & Co., HSBC Holdings Plc, ICBC Standard Bank Plc and others, the LBMA said. And as long as the gold’s here, and the industry is willing to adapt to change, London will probably remain a force in the gold market.