Precious Metal Price Archive — What Was It Worth on the Day?
Getting something out of what you see and read?
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Getting something out of what you see and read?
We put our whole heart into keeping preciousmetalprices.com fast, tidy and free — no paywalls, no clutter, just facts and live prices you can trust. If it’s any help to you, the nicest way to say thanks is to pass it along. Every share helps another investor find us and keeps the whole project ticking over. 💛
What Archive Prices Are Good For
Old prices look like trivia right up to the moment you need one. Own a few ounces of physical metal for long enough and the request arrives from somewhere: Revenue, an insurer, an executor, or your own attempt to work out whether the whole exercise has been worthwhile.
Returns & Performance
Performance is a comparison, and a comparison needs two fixed points. The current quote supplies one; the archive supplies the other. Retrieve the closing price for the day you bought, place it beside today's figure, and the result is no longer a feeling about how things have gone but a number you can defend.
The exercise becomes considerably more interesting with two metals in view at once. Gold and silver tend to move together, yet the size of the move differs sharply — silver exaggerates in both directions. Only a like-for-like comparison over an identical window settles which of them actually repaid you during a particular stretch of the market.
Capital Gains Tax and Documentation
Dispose of bullion at a profit in Ireland and Capital Gains Tax at 33 % applies under section 28 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997. The rate is flat, and holding the metal for longer changes nothing — there is no waiting period that turns a gain tax-free. Each individual does, however, have an annual exempt amount of €1,270 (TCA 1997 s. 601), which covers the first slice of gains each year. It is personal to you: it cannot be transferred to a spouse or civil partner and any unused portion is lost rather than carried forward. Because the chargeable gain is measured against acquisition cost, an archive price becomes the fallback whenever the original receipt has disappeared.
Insurance & Claims
A theft or fire claim turns on a single question: what were the items worth at the moment they were lost? Loss assessors and insurers want a neutral source for that valuation, and a published market reference for the relevant day supplies exactly that — far more persuasive than an estimate reconstructed after the event.
Research & Backtesting
Every strategy sounds convincing until it is run against real prices. That is what backtesting is for: would a standing order into gold since 2010 have beaten buying in one go, and how far did palladium actually fall during the Covid crash? Fund managers and private investors alike depend on a clean, uninterrupted price series to answer questions of that shape.
Three Different Prices, Three Different Purposes
Ask for the gold price and you will get several different answers depending on who you ask. Spot, the London fix and the futures contract are all legitimate quotations, they seldom match exactly, and each belongs to a different job.
Our Reference Price
Everything in this archive traces back to the daily closing price. It emerges from an electronic auction held each business day at 3 p.m. London time — the same hour in Dublin, since Ireland keeps the same clock as the United Kingdom all year round. The resulting figure is accepted internationally as the reference quotation for physical metal.
Why one auction number rather than the live market? Because contracts need something fixed to point at. Refiners, mining companies, bullion banks and central banks settle delivery obligations against the fix, value their reserves with it and strike ETF prices from it. Spot moves continuously and differs slightly between venues; the fix does not move at all once published.
Telling Spot, Fix and Futures Apart
- ◆ Spot price: the live quotation for metal delivered immediately, running continuously on COMEX and across the London over-the-counter market. It never settles on one number for long, and it is what our dashboard displays.
- ◆ Reference fixing: the outcome of a short auction run once daily, published as a single value and used as the binding settlement price throughout the market.
- ◆ Futures price: the price agreed now for metal to be handed over at a stated future date, three months ahead for instance. Funding and storage are built into it, which is why it normally trades a little above spot — the market calls that contango.
Data Sources & Quality
Price data arrives through a professional financial-market feed. Import runs automatically every day and each batch is checked for plausibility. In total the archive now holds more than 45,000 records for gold, silver, platinum and palladium across several currencies.
Tip: For tax documentation and insurance claims the daily closing price is the customary reference — it is set out in the table above.
The Moments That Moved Gold
The gold price does not wander at random. Each of its great advances and each of its long declines can be traced to something specific that happened in the world — a monetary system abandoned, a war begun, a central bank changing course. Six episodes explain most of the past half-century.
The End of Bretton Woods
An ounce cost $35 for as long as the United States promised to swap dollars for metal. Nixon withdrew that promise, the fixed-rate system unravelled with it, and gold ceased to be an administered price. From that point on it traded like any other commodity — which is to say, freely.
The $850 Peak of 1980
Inflation running into double digits, a second oil shock and the Soviet move into Afghanistan combined to lift gold to $850/oz. Adjust that peak for the intervening decades of price rises and it stands above $3,000/oz — a level the market would not revisit in real terms for a very long time.
Two Decades Down to $255/oz
Two decades of decline ended around $255/oz, with the sellers including the central banks themselves. Several European institutions, the Bank of England among them, disposed of substantial reserves close to the bottom of the market — a judgement that reads very differently today than it did at the time.
The 2011 Record of $1,920/oz
The banking crisis of 2008, the sovereign debt emergency that followed across the euro area, and quantitative easing on a scale never previously attempted pushed gold past $1,900/oz. A long correction followed, reaching roughly $1,050/oz by late 2015, before the market turned again.
2020: Past $2,000/oz for the First Time
With economies shut and governments spending without precedent, capital moved into the one asset that carries no counterparty. August 2020 saw gold trade above $2,000/oz for the first time in its history, topping out at $2,075/oz.
2024: Above $2,800/oz
Sustained official buying from China, India and Türkiye, geopolitical conflict and the prospect of rate cuts drove the dollar price beyond $2,800/oz. Euro investors saw the equivalent of that advance in their own currency as gold passed €2,600/oz — a threshold never previously reached.
Historical lesson: Line the episodes up and the common thread is unmistakable: gold advances when trust in currencies or in governments weakens. That is the mirror image of the conditions shares and bonds need in order to prosper, and it is the whole reason a portfolio holds any at all.
Turning Two Prices Into a Return
A percentage on its own says very little. Over what period was it earned, and in money that still buys what it used to? Two corrections turn a raw figure into something meaningful: subtract inflation to move from the nominal to the real return, and express the result as an annual rate so that holdings of different lengths can be set side by side.
Nominal vs. Real Return
- ◆ Nominal return: the plain change in price, with inflation left out of the calculation. Subtract the starting value from the closing value, divide by the starting value and multiply by 100.
- ◆ Real return: what remains once rising prices are accounted for. A nominal 8 % a year against inflation of 3 % a year leaves roughly 5 % a year of genuine purchasing power.
- ◆ Annualised return (CAGR): the constant yearly rate that would have delivered the same outcome. Divide the closing value by the starting value, take the result to the power of 1/n with n as the number of years, then subtract 1.
A Worked Example
Bought: one ounce of gold on 2 January 2019 at €1,120/oz (daily close)
Now: gold trading in the region of €2,600/oz
Nominal return: (2,600 − 1,120) ÷ 1,120 × 100 = +132.1 %
Held for: about 7 years
Annualised return: (2,600 ÷ 1,120)1/7 − 1 = roughly 12.8 % a year
Consumer prices across the euro area rose by something close to 3 % a year over that stretch, so the real return lands near 9.5 % annually. Deposit accounts and government bonds offered nothing remotely comparable during the same seven years.
How Much the Purchase Date Decides
Metal produces no income. It pays no dividend, no coupon and no rent, so the entire return consists of the gap between two prices — which makes the date of purchase unusually decisive. An investor who paid the 2011 high of $1,920/oz spent thirteen years waiting for a worthwhile dollar gain, while one who bought in 2015 or 2018 saw the position more than double.
Nobody recognises the bottom while standing in it, which argues for removing the decision altogether. A regular purchase of a fixed amount, month after month, averages the entry price across strong and weak markets alike and takes the single worst outcome — committing everything at the top — off the table.