Gold bars: the same gold with nothing struck on it

A bar is gold and a number: 999.9 fine, a weight on the stamp, a serial, and the name of the refinery that cast or minted it. No face value, no mint, no year, no country — so a buyer asking for a 100 g bar is asking for the cheapest 100 g of gold a dealer will hand over, and this site shows that, whoever made it; and a buyer who wants a PAMP or a C.Hafner sees each maker’s own price beside it.

What separates a bar from a coin is not the gold. A one-ounce bar and a Krugerrand hold the same 31.1035 g; the coin is struck by a mint as money, with a face value and a legal tender it will never be spent at, and the bar is poured or pressed by a refinery and sold with the card it was sealed into. Nothing is paid for striking money on a bar, so a bar usually asks a little less over the metal than the coin of the same weight — and the coin pays that back when it is sold, because a Krugerrand is known by sight at any counter in the world and a bar is known by its card and its assay.

The refineries are the ones on the LBMA Good Delivery list — PAMP, Valcambi, Argor-Heraeus, Heraeus, C.Hafner, Metalor, Umicore, Italpreziosi, the Perth Mint and the Royal Canadian Mint among them — and a dealer that stocks one stocks several. This site reads the weight and the maker off the page. Each maker’s bar is priced on its own, so the switch between Coins and Bars at the top of the map shows PAMP’s 100 g beside C.Hafner’s and Heraeus’s; and “any brand” is each shop’s cheapest bar of the weight, whoever made it, saying whose. A bar whose page names no maker on the list, or several, or promises whichever the shop has, is filed under the other brands.

The arithmetic of the small bars is the arithmetic of the fractional coins, only steeper. Minting, the assay card and the shop’s margin are paid per bar, whether it holds a gram or a kilo; spread over a gram they are a fifth of the price, over a kilo a point or two. The gram bar is a gift, the ten grams a monthly habit, the hundred grams the size the European market trades most, and the kilo a sum of money that is bought by telephone. The premium under each weight below says where on that curve it sits.

In the European Union both are investment gold and sold without VAT — a bar at 995 fine or better, a coin at 900 or better struck after 1800 and sold near its metal — so the tax never decides between them. What does is the premium, which is the number this site compares, and what each will be worth to sell: the smaller the piece, the easier to sell and the dearer to buy, bar or coin alike.