Why the gold futures contract specification is the price
When a dispatch in this archive says gold settled at a figure, it is quoting a specific instrument: a named contract, for a named delivery month, on a named exchange. The number by itself carries almost no information. The same metal on the same afternoon traded in 100-ounce lots quoted in dollars per ounce in New York, in one-kilogram lots quoted in yen per gram in Tokyo, and in one-kilogram lots quoted in rupees per ten grams in Mumbai. Three prices, three unrelated magnitudes, one metal, and three different gold futures contracts behind them.
This is the material the archive earned search positions with, which is a useful signal about what people actually needed. Price commentary was abundant and free; a clear statement of what a contract contained was neither.
The naming is part of the confusion. The 100-ounce dollar contract is a COMEX product, but COMEX has been a division of NYMEX since 1994 and both have sat inside the same exchange group since 2008, so the trade shorthand of the period was simply NYMEX gold. The archive's own quote pages used that label, the GC contract filed under a NYMEX gold heading, which is why those addresses now resolve to this page rather than to a section hub.
COMEX and MCX contract sizes and quotation
Every gold futures contract sets its own size and quotation convention, chosen to suit its own participants, and they follow the local retail habit rather than any international standard. India quotes gold per ten grams because that is how Indian retail quotes it; Japan quotes per gram; the dollar-denominated venues quote per troy ounce. The contract size then reflects the size of a typical wholesale parcel in that market.
| Venue | Contract size | Quotation | Minimum increment | Value of one increment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| COMEX (New York) | 100 troy oz | USD / troy oz | $0.10 / oz | $10.00 |
| COMEX mini | 50 troy oz | USD / troy oz | $0.25 / oz | $12.50 |
| TOCOM (Tokyo) | 1 kg | JPY / gram | ¥1 / gram | ¥1,000 |
| MCX (Mumbai) | 1 kg | INR / 10 grams | ₹1 / 10 g | ₹100 |
| MCX Gold Mini | 100 g | INR / 10 grams | ₹1 / 10 g | ₹10 |
| DGCX (Dubai) | 32 troy oz | USD / troy oz | $0.10 / oz | $3.20 |
Sizes and conventions as they stood during the period this archive covers, 2011–2016. Exchanges revise specifications, so a current contract should always be checked against the exchange's own rulebook rather than against a historical figure, including the ones on this page.
Ticks, and the arithmetic that trips people
A tick is the smallest price change a contract permits, and its value in money is the tick size multiplied by the contract size. That single sentence resolves most confusion, and skipping it produces the most common error in cross-market reporting: treating a rupee move and a dollar move as comparable magnitudes because both are “one point”.
Worked through: a ten-cent move on a 100-ounce COMEX contract is ten dollars. A one-rupee move per ten grams on a one-kilogram MCX contract is a hundred rupees, because a kilogram contains a hundred units of ten grams. At the exchange rates prevailing in 2013 those two are roughly similar in value, which is a coincidence of that period and not a rule. The mini contracts exist precisely so that smaller participants can take a position whose tick value is proportionate to their capital.
Margin, and why exchanges raise it
Margin is not a fee and not a deposit against the purchase price. It is a performance bond calibrated to the contract's daily volatility, held against the possibility that a position moves against its holder before it can be closed. Because it is calibrated to volatility, it rises when volatility rises: automatically at some venues, by announcement at others.
An exchange can also raise margin deliberately to slow speculation, and that is what the Shanghai silver dispatches in this archive record. Increasing the deposit required makes a leveraged position more expensive to hold without changing the contract, the deliverable or the price. When an exchange does it twice in one quarter, the useful information is not the margin level but the admission that turnover grew faster than its own risk framework had assumed.
Delivery, and how rarely it happens
Almost no futures position ends in delivery. Participants close out or roll into the next month, because the point of the instrument is exposure rather than metal. But delivery is what makes the price real: because a holder *can* demand bars from an approved warehouse, the futures price cannot drift far from the physical market without arbitrage closing the gap.
That link is also why exchange warehouse stock reports are worth reading. They are among the few genuinely public physical data series in the complex, and they show the deliverable inventory behind the paper. Several dispatches in this archive quote them, and the restored pages state which venue's warehouse figure was being cited, because registered and eligible stock are different categories and are routinely conflated.
For the layer above all of this, the benchmark that these contracts are ultimately priced against, see how gold is priced, and for the unit conversions the table above assumes, the Charts & Data hub.
Where to check this
This page is current writing, so its mechanisms can be checked against the bodies that publish them. Figures inside the restored dispatches stay as filed.
- LBMA The reference price, and the auction that establishes it twice each London business day.
Common questions
What is a gold futures contract specification?
The rulebook entry defining exactly what is being traded: how much metal, at what purity, quoted in what currency and unit, in which delivery months, with what minimum price increment, and deliverable at which approved warehouses. Two contracts on the same metal at two exchanges are different instruments, and a price for one is not a price for the other.
How do I convert a tick into money?
Multiply the tick size by the contract size. A COMEX gold contract is 100 troy ounces with a minimum increment of ten cents an ounce, so one tick is ten dollars per contract. An MCX gold contract is one kilogram quoted in rupees per ten grams, so a one-rupee increment is a hundred rupees per contract. The two numbers are not comparable and never should be placed side by side without the conversion stated.
Why did the Shanghai Gold Exchange keep raising margins on silver?
Margin is the performance deposit a position requires, and raising it makes carrying that position more expensive without altering the contract itself. It is the standard tool for slowing turnover in an overheating market. Doing it twice in a single quarter, as happened in late 2011, indicates the exchange's volume assumptions had been overtaken, which is what the restored dispatch reports.
Do futures contracts actually deliver metal?
Very few do. The overwhelming majority are closed or rolled before expiry, because most participants want price exposure rather than bars. Delivery still matters, though: the possibility of it is what ties the futures price to the physical market, and the warehouse stock reports that delivery requires are among the most useful public data in the whole complex.