If you've ever built or consumed a price feed for equities or crypto and assumed precious metals would follow the same pattern — one continuous number, ticking constantly, one "true" source of truth — the actual structure of gold pricing will surprise you. There isn't one price. There are at least two, they're produced by different mechanisms, and neither one is exactly what a retail checkout page shows you.
The market is nearly always open, but the "official" price isn't continuous
Gold futures on CME trade close to around the clock. Per CME Group's own contract specifications, the 1-ounce gold contract runs "24/7 with the exception of the following maintenance windows: Saturday at 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. CT" and a two-minute daily gap Monday through Friday at 4:00-4:02 p.m. CT. So from a "when is there a live tick" standpoint, gold behaves almost like crypto — sparse, short, predictable gaps rather than a real market close.
But that continuous futures feed isn't the benchmark most of the bullion industry actually prices against for settlement purposes. That's a separate mechanism entirely.
The benchmark price is a twice-daily auction, not a tick
Per the LBMA's own documentation, the LBMA Gold Price is set twice a day — 10:30 and 15:00 UK time — through an electronic auction where a chairperson sets a starting price, participants submit buy/sell orders by volume, and the auction concludes once the net imbalance falls within a 10,000 oz tolerance. It's explicitly described as producing a settlement price, not a running feed: "all volume tradeable at that price," for that one moment.
So you've got two legitimately different data objects with the word "gold price" attached to them: a near-continuous futures tick that updates constantly but reflects one exchange's order book, and a twice-daily settlement number that's contractually referenced across huge parts of the physical bullion trade but is stale by definition the instant after it's published.
A 1 oz gold coin, priced against a live spot feed rather than the twice-daily benchmark auction
Photo: Gilded Bullion
Where this actually bites you as a developer
TTL choice isn't obvious. Cache a futures-derived spot feed too long and you're visibly stale during active trading hours. Cache the LBMA auction result with a short TTL and you're just re-fetching a number that's correct but was already correct an hour ago — wasted requests for zero freshness gain.
"Market closed" isn't a clean state. Unlike equities, there's no single well-defined closed period to fall back to a last-known-good value cleanly — the maintenance windows are short and asymmetric (a 2-minute daily gap, a 2-hour weekend gap), so your fallback logic needs to handle brief gaps gracefully rather than a predictable multi-hour close.
The number a customer sees usually isn't either of the above, unmodified. Retail pricing (ours included) applies a per-product premium on top of whichever spot feed it's built on, and that premium can itself change independently of the metal price — so "the price" a cache serves is really a composite of at least two independently-updating values, not one.
Practically, this pushed us toward pricing every listing dynamically against a live feed rather than a periodically-refreshed cached price — our gold bullion listings reprice continuously through the day rather than on a fixed refresh interval, specifically because the "safe" cache window for this kind of data is much shorter than it looks at first glance. Same logic applies on the silver bullion side, where spot moves proportionally faster relative to price than gold does.
If you're building anything that touches a metals price feed — a portfolio tracker, a checkout, an alert system — worth deciding up front which of the two numbers you actually need, because they answer different questions and neither substitutes cleanly for the other.
This is general information about market structure, not investment, tax or legal advice; precious-metal prices can fall as well as rise.
Alexander Sterling is the founder and CEO of Gilded Bullion, a US-based online dealer in gold, silver, platinum and palladium bullion.
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