How we price it
Where every figure
Goldza publishes one honest number for the metal and shows exactly how it is built. The site itself buys no gold and sells no gold, so nothing here is priced to move stock. Every figure on the site is either read from a live feed, computed by arithmetic you can check, or attributed to a named source. Where something is uncertain, we say so.
The rand gold price is a currency calculation
Gold trades in US dollars per troy ounce on the international market. The South African price is that dollar price converted at the USD/ZAR exchange rate. So the rand gold price rises and falls on two things at once: the dollar gold price, and the strength of the rand. This is why gold can hit records in rands while barely moving in dollars, and it is the single most important thing to understand about the price. We break it down on the rand effect.
Our live board reads the rand gold price directly from a spot metals feed (goldapi.io, XAU/ZAR), stamped with the time it was fetched. Coins and bars trade at a premium over this spot metal value, typically a few percent, to cover minting and dealing; the board and the per-karat pages show the metal value, not a dealer's coin price.
Each karat is its legal purity times the pure price
Pure gold is R2 198,15 a gram right now; the 24-carat figure of R2 195,95 you see quoted is 99.9% of it, since 24ct is stamped 999 fine. Every karat is a fixed fraction of pure gold, set by its legal gold content. Multiply the pure price by that fraction and you have the metal value, gram for gram. So 9ct, at 37.5%, is R824,30; 18ct, at 75%, is R1 648,61. You can repeat every figure on the site this way.
| Stamp | Karat | Gold content | Fraction of the pure price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 375 | 9ct | 37.5% | ×37.5% |
| 585 | 14ct | 58.5% | ×58.5% |
| 750 | 18ct | 75% | ×75% |
| 916 | 22ct | 91.67% | ×91.67% |
| 999 | 24ct | 99.9% | ×99.9% |
Cadence, and what happens when the feed is down
The board is refreshed once a day, in the morning, South African time, and every figure carries the timestamp of the fetch it came from. Gold trades continuously, so a figure here is that morning's snapshot, not a live intraday tick and not a promise for the next minute. If the feed cannot be reached, we do not pretend: the page drops the word live, shows the last confirmed figure labelled as a reference with the time it was confirmed, and never dresses a stale number up as live.
The historical series behind the rand-effect chart
The chart on why gold is so expensive here uses annual averages, not intraday prices, and is indicative rather than tick-accurate. The dollar gold price is an LBMA-based annual average in US dollars per troy ounce; the USD/ZAR rate is an annual average (Nedbank Group Economic Unit, Reuters 9am, cross-checked against public exchange-rate records); South African CPI is Statistics South Africa's index, 2015 = 100, taken via the OECD/FRED series. The rand gold line is not sourced separately, it is computed as the dollar price times the exchange rate, which is the whole point the chart is making. Two years, 2014 and 2017, are left out rather than guessed, because we did not hold a cross-checked average for them. Before quoting any single year to the dollar, re-confirm it against the LBMA or the World Gold Council.
What is verified, computed, or sourced
- Live: the rand gold spot price, from the metals feed, timestamped.
- Computed: per-karat, per-ounce and per-kilogram values, coin melt values, and any historical rand gold figure worked as the dollar price times the exchange rate. The arithmetic is shown so you can repeat it.
- Sourced: legal, tax and heritage facts, each tied to a named Act, regulator or publication. Historical dollar gold and exchange-rate averages are attributed and, where indicative, labelled as such.
- Never invented: we do not publish a number we cannot show the origin of. Buyer-payout ranges are stated as general bands, not false precision.
Sources we lean on
The market and refining chain: the LBMA (international benchmark), Rand Refinery and the South African Mint (refining and the Krugerrand), and the SARB and Statistics South Africa (the rand and inflation). The selling reality: the SADPMR, SAPS, the FIC and SARS.
The desk is written and reviewed in-house. If we get something wrong, we fix it in the open and log it on the corrections page. Prices are data, not financial advice, and Goldza is not a licensed financial services provider.
The Goldza desk