Gold rate in São Tomé and Príncipe

What is the Gold Price Fixing?

For over a century, five companies ran the London Gold Market Fixing Company and set prices through a process conducted by telephone called the “London Gold Fix.” 1 On March 20, 2015, the ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA) took over and replaced the process with an electronic auction system called the LBMA Gold Price. 2 3 The LBMA owns the rights to the process. Several banks, an oversight committee, and a panel of internal and external chair members make up the IBA. Twice daily, at 10:30 AM and 3:00 PM UK Time, the IBA publishes the LBMA Gold Price in US dollars, which serves as a benchmark price for gold producers, investors, consumers, and central banks worldwide. The price of gold is adjusted in real-time based on financial evaluations of anonymous auction rounds run every 45 seconds. When all buy and sell orders and imbalances are within 20,000 troy ounces, the price is fixed.

What is Gold?

Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from Latin: aurum) and atomic number 79, making it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly reddish yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions. Gold has an extremely high density at 19.3 g per cubic centimeter, slightly greater than lead. Like all other metals, gold is malleable. However, it's much more easily pressed-out than most other metals. In fact, just one ounce of gold can be stretched to over 300 square feet. Some other properties of gold include its high resistance to oxidation. Typically, metals often form oxide later on their surface due to exposure to oxygen at room temperature and room conditions; gold doesn't form this layer easily. Additionally, gold is unaffected by most acids and bases. Gold is quite resilient!