CaratTen Chinese gold counters priced within seven yuan of each other
On 25 August the brand boards read 1,403 to 1,410 yuan a gram, a spread of 0.499%. Chow Sang Sang added 18 yuan in a session, Chow Tai Fook 17.
§1Ten boards, seven yuan, one morning.
Ten Chinese jewellery brands posted gold counter prices on 25 August inside a range of seven yuan a gram. Chow Tai Fook, Chow Tai Seng, Chow Hong Ji and Tse Sui Luen all read 1,410 yuan. Lao Miao read 1,407. Chow Sang Sang and Luk Fook read 1,408. Lao Feng Xiang read 1,406. Zhou Liu Fu read 1,405. China Gold read 1,403, the lowest of the ten. The spread from lowest to highest is 7 yuan, or 0.499% of the low, this desk's arithmetic on the published board.
§2The day's move was three times the distance across the field.
The move into that level was larger than the distance across it. On 24 August, Chow Tai Fook read 1,393 and Chow Sang Sang 1,390, with Lao Miao also at 1,393. A session later Chow Sang Sang had added 18 yuan, or 1.295%, Chow Tai Fook 17 yuan, or 1.220%, and Lao Miao 14 yuan, or 1.005%. So the counters moved between two and three times further in one day than they sit apart from one another, which is the ordinary condition of this market and the reason the tight spread is worth stating rather than assuming.
Ten independent boards, one price, and half a percent of daylight between them.
§3What a counter price is, and what it is not.
What the tightness means is narrower than it looks. These are retail counter prices for finished gold jewellery, not a spot quotation, and they carry each brand's own workmanship charge and margin above the metal. A half-percent spread across ten independent retailers on the same morning indicates the brands are pricing off a common metal reference and competing on a very thin band above it, not that they have agreed anything.
Where brands genuinely differ is in the per-gram labour charge added at the till, which these board figures do not disclose and this desk therefore does not report.
One half of this story is not printed here. A 26 August pullback, with figures circulating for four of these brands, reached this desk from a single source with its day-over-day change back-calculated rather than published. This desk could not confirm the 26 August board against a second independent source this morning, so those four figures do not appear above and no 25-to-26 August change is stated. The 25 August board is carried because ten brand quotations for that session were confirmed, and the 24 August figures for three brands were confirmed alongside them.
The number to keep is 1,403 to 1,410, because it is a rare clean reading of what Chinese consumers were actually asked to pay for gold jewellery on a single named day, and it sits about 30% above the 1,082 to 1,090 band these same counters occupied in the spring.
The tightness is the signal. When ten retailers price within half a percent of each other, none of them believes it has room to hold a level the metal has left.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →