How this site measures the range

Every figure on this site comes from the India Bullion and Jewellers Association’s own published benchmark, read fresh each run and converted to one gram. This page describes the process, its limits, and what a reader should not conclude from it.

What a four-month series can answer that a single day cannot

A single day’s rate is just a point. A four-month series turns that point into a position: you can see whether today sits near the top of the band, near the bottom, or in the middle. That is the difference between knowing a price and knowing whether the price is high. A buyer who sees only the daily figure is deciding in the dark; a buyer who sees the range is deciding with context.

This context matters because gold in India moves in cycles. Wedding season, festival demand and the rupee’s path against the dollar all leave their mark over weeks and months. A four-month window captures enough of that movement to smooth out single-day noise, but not so much that the comparison becomes meaningless. It is the shortest period that still contains both a seasonal peak and a seasonal trough for most readers.

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Where the range itself comes from and how far back it reaches

The range is built from the association’s own published benchmark, announced twice on every trading day. Each reading is taken from the correct half of the page — the morning table and the afternoon table are kept separate — and converted to one gram before anything is stored. The high is the highest of those readings over the last four months; the low is the lowest; the median is the middle value when all readings are lined up in order.

The four-month window begins on the date the page is generated and reaches back a fixed number of days. It is not a rolling average, and it is not adjusted for festivals or for the day of the week. If the association did not publish on a given day, that day simply does not appear in the series. The range therefore reflects only days on which a benchmark actually existed.

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When a reading is thrown away rather than published

Not every number the association publishes is accepted. A reading is refused if its domestic premium over the international gram falls outside a band of zero to twenty-five per cent, because that would suggest a data error or a market dislocation too extreme to be useful. A reading is also refused if the purity ladder does not fall with purity, or if the published rate is more than five days old.

These checks are deliberately conservative. They mean the site sometimes shows nothing rather than show a number that might mislead. When a reading is refused, the rest of the page is not written; the site simply waits for the next valid benchmark. The reader is never asked to trust a figure that has failed a basic sanity test.

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What a range says nothing about

A range tells you where the benchmark has been, not where it will go. It says nothing about making charges, which vary from shop to shop and are never published. It says nothing about a jeweller’s own margin, which is added on top of the benchmark and is also never published. And it says nothing about what a counter will pay on buy-back, because that rate is set privately and is not collected anywhere.

The benchmark is a reference for tax, for lending against jewellery and for buy-back counters, but it is not a price at which you can buy or sell. The range is a map of that reference over time, not a promise about tomorrow. A reader who understands this will not mistake a high in the range for a recommendation to wait, or a low for a recommendation to buy.

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