Gold Price Chart

Choosing the right time range on a gold chart

A gold price chart plots the U.S. dollar price of one troy ounce of gold over time, and the range you choose decides what story it tells. A one-day chart shows noise and news; a twenty-year chart shows the trend that noise sits on.

Each range on this page is drawn from a different kind of data. The short ranges use intraday prices, the middle ranges use one closing price per trading day, and the longest ranges use sampled closes so the chart loads quickly on a phone.

Why sampled charts can miss a spike

A chart built from weekly or fortnightly samples draws a line between those points. A sharp one-day spike or crash that reversed before the next sample simply doesn’t appear. Closing prices have a similar blind spot: a trade at a higher level during the day never shows on a close-only line. That is why an intraday record in a news story can sit above anything visible on a long-range chart. Exact daily figures for any year are in the gold price history tables.

A live gold price chart vs a closing-price chart

The one-day view moves with every quote while the market is open. Everything longer is built from closing prices, which don’t change once the day is over. If the header price and the last point on a long chart differ, the header is the newer number. For the current quote in every unit, check the live gold price on the home page.

Scale, percent change and drawdowns

Linear vs logarithmic scale

On a linear scale, every $100 takes up the same vertical space. That makes recent moves look dramatic because the price is so much higher than it was twenty years ago. A rise from $300 to $600 doubled the price, a 100% gain. A rise from $2,000 to $2,300 was only 15%, yet on a linear chart it looks like the bigger climb.

A logarithmic scale fixes that by giving equal space to equal percentage changes. Charting packages offer it as a toggle, and it is the fairer way to compare the 1970s, the 2000s and the 2020s on a single chart.

Working out your own percent change

1. Read the starting price from the chart, or better, from the history tables, which give exact closes.
2. Read the ending price the same way.
3. Subtract the start from the end and divide by the start. Multiply by 100 for a percentage.
4. For an annual rate, divide the end by the start, raise that to the power of one divided by the number of years, and subtract one.

A worked example with round numbers: gold going from $1,000 to $2,000 over ten years is a 100% total gain, but only about 7.2% a year compounded. Headlines usually quote the first number, while comparisons with savings accounts or stocks need the second.

Reading a drawdown

A drawdown is the fall from a previous peak to a later low. It answers a question the percent-change figure hides: how far did the price drop along the way? The math has an asymmetry worth knowing. After a 10% fall, gold needs an 11.1% rise to get back to the peak; after a 50% fall, it needs 100%. How far today’s price sits from the record is tracked on the gold all-time high page.

What a gold price chart leaves out

A chart is a record of one number: the dollar price of an ounce of pure gold in the wholesale market. Several things that matter to real buyers and sellers are not in it.

• Inflation. The chart is in nominal dollars. A price from 1980 and a price from last year are measured in dollars with very different buying power.
• Retail premiums and buyer discounts. What people paid for coins or received for jewelry sat above or below the line, and the gap changed over time.
• Your own currency. A buyer in India, Turkey or Japan saw a different chart shape because of exchange-rate moves.
• Taxes. The IRS taxes gains on physical gold as collectibles, at a maximum long-term rate of 28%.
• Weekend gaps. Nothing trades from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening, so Monday’s chart can open with a jump the line simply bridges.
• The forecast. A chart describes the past. Analyst views on where the price may go are collected on the gold price forecast page, with their limits explained.

Futures rolls and small jumps

Our charts use front-month COMEX futures prices. Every couple of months the active contract changes to the next delivery month, and a continuous futures series can show a small step at that point. The step reflects the interest-rate difference between the two contracts, not a change in the market. Over years the effect is minor, but it explains why two charts from different providers are never quite identical.

Using the gold-to-silver ratio chart

The ratio chart divides the gold price by the silver price on each day. The result tells you how many ounces of silver one ounce of gold would buy.

How to calculate it yourself

1. Take the gold price per troy ounce.
2. Take the silver price per troy ounce at the same time.
3. Divide gold by silver. If gold is $2,400 and silver is $30 in a worked example, the ratio is 80.

A rising ratio means gold is outperforming silver, while a falling ratio means silver is doing better. The ratio has moved over a wide range in modern times. In March 2020, as markets sold off at the start of the pandemic, it spiked above 100, then fell back as silver recovered. The ratio does not say which metal will do better next, and it is best treated as a measure of relative price, not a signal.

Current prices for both metals, with the live ratio, are on the gold and silver prices page.

Silver moves more sharply than gold in both directions, partly because industrial users make up a large share of its demand. Its own chart and price table are on the silver price page.

Chart terms in brief

• Close: the last price of a trading session, or the official settlement price, depending on the data source.
• OHLC: open, high, low and close, the four prices that summarize one period.
• Candlestick: a chart style that draws each period’s OHLC as a box with thin lines above and below.
• Moving average: the average of the last set number of closes, used to smooth out daily noise.
• Range: the distance between the highest and lowest price in the period shown.