Gold is bought and sold in a wide range of forms, quality, delivery locations, forward time conditions and types of transactional exchanges, producing very different prices at any one time. Most common gold price reporting is for commercially standard, pure .999 fine bullion bars in kilogram or larger bar sizes. Commodity exchanges like the COMEX report previous transaction prices to the public on a 5-15 minute delayed basis.

Current gold prices are the two price levels where traders are most actively making a market, which represent where those are willing to buy versus sell. The best value for a current price of gold is the nominal price between those prices on an active high volume marketplace for immediate delivery, which is most commonly referred to as the spot price of gold. Gold prices are recorded over time as comparison, and charted to suggest trends and overextended price moves. Besides the current gold price, how it compares to a previous day’s final price and average of previous spot prices are frequently monitored.