Gold bar 1 oz or Gold bar 50 g: which is the better buy today?
Gold bar 1 oz and Gold bar 50 g are the same object at two sizes — 999.9 gold from an LBMA refinery, with the weight on the stamp — and Gold bar 50 g holds 1.61 times the gold of Gold bar 1 oz: 50.00 g against 31.10 g. The metal costs the same per gram in both; what differs is how much of the price is the making rather than the gold, and the small one always carries more of it.
| coin | Gold bar 1 oz | Gold bar 50 g |
|---|---|---|
| fine gold | 31.10 g | 50.00 g |
| gross weight | 31.10 g | 50.00 g |
| purity | 999.9 ‰ · 24 kt | 999.9 ‰ · 24 kt |
| length × width | 41.1 × 24.1 mm | 48.5 × 28.5 mm |
| thickness | 1.63 mm | 1.87 mm |
| face value | none — a bar is not money | none — a bar is not money |
| struck | LBMA Good Delivery | LBMA Good Delivery |
The prices come from the feed, and the feed has not answered yet.
Gold bar 1 oz — The troy ounce as a bar: the same gold as a Krugerrand or a Maple Leaf, cast or minted by a refinery rather than struck by a mint, and usually a little cheaper over the metal for it.
Gold bar 50 g — Fifty grams, the same face as the 100 g at half the thickness: a bar big enough to be mostly gold and small enough to sell in one go.
Both are 999.9 fine gold, cast or minted by a refinery on the LBMA Good Delivery list — PAMP, Valcambi, Argor-Heraeus, Heraeus, Metalor — and stamped with their weight and a serial: the same object at two sizes, and nothing between them but the number on the stamp.
What decides between them is not the gold, which costs the same per gram in both, but what is paid per bar: the minting or the casting, the assay card, the shop’s margin. Spread over 31.10 g the small one carries far more of it per gram than the big one does over 50.00 g — which is why Gold bar 1 oz is nearly always the dearer gold, and why it is bought anyway: it sells in smaller pieces, in one go.
So the comparison is the premium. Whichever of the two a dealer asks less for above its metal is the cheaper gold that day — and that changes shop by shop and day by day, which is what the numbers above are for.