Gold bar 250 g or Gold bar 500 g: which is the better buy today?
Gold bar 250 g and Gold bar 500 g are the same object at two sizes — 999.9 gold from an LBMA refinery, with the weight on the stamp — and Gold bar 500 g holds 2.00 times the gold of Gold bar 250 g: 500.00 g against 250.00 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 250 g | Gold bar 500 g |
|---|---|---|
| fine gold | 250.00 g | 500.00 g |
| gross weight | 250.00 g | 500.00 g |
| purity | 999.9 ‰ · 24 kt | 999.9 ‰ · 24 kt |
| length × width | 70 × 40 mm | 80 × 48 mm |
| thickness | 4.65 mm | 6.75 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 250 g — A quarter kilo, eight ounces: sold cast as often as minted, and a sum of money rather than a piece to hand over a counter.
Gold bar 500 g — Half a kilo, sixteen ounces: a vault size, bought for the premium, which is close to the kilo’s, and sold whole.
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 250.00 g the small one carries far more of it per gram than the big one does over 500.00 g — which is why Gold bar 250 g 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.