The price on the screen is born in places most collectors never see. Here is the family tree.
Between the price on the financial screen and the coin in your palm stretches an invisible supply chain of exchanges, vaults, refiners, and mints. Walk it once and every quote you ever receive will make more sense.
The continuously updating prices on financial screens derive largely from two wholesale arenas: futures exchanges, led by COMEX in New York, and the over-the-counter market centered in London. On COMEX, standardized contracts, 100 troy ounces for gold, 5,000 for silver, change hands between institutions in enormous volume, and the nearby contract’s price becomes the heartbeat the world watches.
Most futures contracts are settled in cash or rolled forward without a single bar moving, and that is by design, not scandal: futures exist so miners can lock in prices for metal not yet dug, so jewelers can hedge inventory, and so the market can discover prices continuously. Physical delivery does occur, in exchange-approved bars held in licensed vaults, but it is the exception that anchors the system rather than its daily business.
The London OTC market trades allocated and unallocated metal against the standard of the Good Delivery bar: roughly 400 troy ounces for gold and about 1,000 for silver, refined to exacting standards by accredited refiners. When institutions speak of "loco London" metal, they mean claims on exactly this kind of bar in exactly those vaults. It is a very real market and a very different object from anything in a collector’s cabinet.
From that wholesale bar, metal flows to refiners who recast it, to mints, sovereign and private, who strike it into coins and small bars, to wholesalers who distribute it, and finally to dealers who authenticate, insure, and hand it to you. Every stage adds fabrication, logistics, and service, which is the anatomy of the premium over spot and the reason the screen number is the beginning of a retail price rather than the end of one.