Methodology

Last updated 1 October 2026

Everything here is worked out from figures that are published openly, collected automatically and stored so each number can be traced back to its source. Here is how we get each one.

What we collect, and how often

We read each tracked dealer's public pages once an hour, for gold and silver. We record the price a dealer sells a product for, and the price it pays to buy one back where the dealer publishes it.

We identify ourselves openly on every request, and we check a dealer's robots.txt before we read their site.

The spot price

Metals trade in US dollars per troy ounce. We take spot from a commercial data feed, and on every capture we store the US dollar price, the AUD/USD exchange rate and the Australian dollar price we derive from them.

Storing all three means the premium can be reproduced later. It also lets us distinguish a move in the metal from a move in the Australian dollar.

The premium

The premium is the amount paid above the underlying value of the metal. We calculate it as:

(Dealer price − metal value) ÷ metal value × 100

The metal value is the spot price per troy ounce multiplied by the product's weight.

Each dealer price is stored against the spot reading that was current when we collected it, so the two belong together.

How we group products

Each dealer names and lists products differently. We normalise each listing to a common product record based on its metal, weight, form, brand and design. This lets comparable products from different dealers appear together, while keeping products with meaningful differences separate.

We do not treat different products as equivalent simply because they contain the same amount of metal.

Which dealers, and how fresh

We track a set of Australian dealers, not the whole market, and the set is growing. Prices are hourly snapshots, so they can differ from a dealer's live site by the time you click through. A price we have not refreshed for more than two hours is hidden rather than shown as current.

Always confirm the live price on the dealer's site before you buy.

We also do not list everything a dealer sells. When a dealer puts up something new, we assess it against the products we already track and check the grouping by hand before it appears here.

The catalogue therefore lags what dealers offer, and it grows over time.

Buy-back

Some dealers publish what they pay to buy a product back, and some standalone buyers publish per-item offers. We read those every hour, the same as dealer prices, and show them in the sell comparison.

A buyer will quote you on the day, and that quote is the one that counts.

What we don't do

We do not rank dealers, score them or name a best. We do not predict prices.

We publish the facts and let you decide.

Corrections

If a number looks wrong, it might be. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it quickly.