London Gold Fixing website
www.goldfixing.com
taken offline, chairperson in the shadows
https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan ... e-shadows/
The last ever ‘Gold Fixing’ will take place on the afternoon of Thursday 19th March 2015 at 3.00pm.
Following the last fixing, the
www.goldfixing.com
website of the London Gold Market Fixing Limited will be immediately and permanently taken off-line as of close of business 19th March (i.e. the web server will be made inaccessible to web browsers).
London Gold Market Fixing Limited (LGMFL) recently confirmed to me that:
“The Gold Fixing website will be taken down completely as of the close of business on Thursday 19-3-15 and from 20-3-15 the new LBMA Gold Price will appear on their website
www.lbma.org.uk
. All the historical gold Fixing price data on the
www.goldfixing.com
website is already available on the LBMA website.“
This power-down and switching off of the web server follows a similar manoeuvre on the evening of 14th August 2014, when the web site of the London Silver Market Fixing Limited,
www.silverfixing.com
, was immediately and permanently switched off (without warning), leaving no trace of the live website.
By the time you read this, the
www.goldfixing.com
web site may be switched off.
This is very unusual behavior by the administrators of the fixing web sites and the bullion banks that run the Gold Fixing and Silver Fixing Companies to immediately make the web sites inaccessible. It’s as if the two Fixing Companies want to vanish without a trace from the internet.
The Gold Fixing website domain was first registered on 22 Dec 1999 by
emilie.rivoire@rothschild.co.uk
, and is listed with a tech support contact of
barclaysmsosupport@sapient.com
. See Domain lookup. So there is still a direct reference to Barclays in the web site and in the Sapient app, which is interesting given that Barclays was the firm that was fined by the FCA for manipulating the gold fixing in 2012 and whose trader Daniel Plunkett was also fined for the same offence.
Interestingly, the London Silver Market Fixing Limited has not been wound up, and still exists as a company, and its directors, until recently, represented HSBC, Scotia and Deutsche Bank. The only Deutsche director, New York based Eric Parker, resigned from the company last December. The HSBC and Scotia directors are still in situ.
The London Gold Market Fixing Limited also still exists as a company (obviously), and its directors are representatives of HSBC, Scotia, Barclays and SocGen, and all of these directors are still in situ. The two most recent Deutsche directors, Kevin Rodgers and James Vorley, resigned from the company on 14th May 2014, which was the same day that Deutsche Bank dropped out of the daily Gold Fixing process.
Both the Gold and Silver Fixing Companies have a registered address of c/o Hackwood Secretaries Limited, One Silk Street, London EC2Y 8HQ. Hackwood Secretaries Limited is a company belonging to Linklaters law firm. See the Linklaters ownership of Hackwood Secretaries here. Hackwood Secretaries is also the registered address of London Precious Metal Clearing Limited (LPMCL), the precious metals clearing company of Barclays, HSBC, Scotia, UBS, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank.
Gold Price Data
From Friday 20th March 2015, the LBMA Gold Price data will appear on the London Bullion Market Association’s (LBMA) web site at
http://www.lbma.org.uk/pricing-and-statistics
. From 20th March, the daily fixings are being administered by ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA). There is some historical gold fixing price data already on the LBMA site, however it is less detailed than the historical gold price data which had appeared on the
www.goldfixing.com
web site.
On the Gold Fixing web site, the daily and historical data both included the net volume of gold bars bought and sold at the fixing price, as well as the number of participants who had non-zero interest at the fixing price. This extra detail was added to the gold fixing website in the second half of last year. See screen shots below, both daily and historical. Historical data could also be toggled between dollars, euro and pounds.
Daily gold fixing prices
Historical
In contrast, the gold price data currently displayed on the LBMA web site does not include net volume of bars bought and sold at the fixing price, nor the number of participants declaring a buy or sell interest at the fixing price. See screenshot below.
Gold Price data
London Gold Market Fixing Limited’s representative confirmed to me recently that all the historical Gold Fixing price data from
www.goldfixing.com
is already on the LBMA site. But without the volume and participant data, this claim is not entirely accurate. Adding in the volume (in bars) and the participant totals would make the data more complete.
ICE Benchmark Administration do mention a transparency report which will be published after each auction. This report will contain volume and participant numbers. It remains to be seen if this report will be published on the LBMA website. From the LBMA FAQ:
“At the end of the auction process, IBA will publish the benchmark price. IBA will also publish a Transparency Report showing for each round: the price in USD; the aggregated bid and offer volume; the number of participants; and the timings for each round.”
The current gold price data disclaimer on the LBMA web site (for data up to 19th March) states that “Fixing data reproduced by kind permission of the London Gold Market Fixing Ltd” . Please refer to its website to see licensing requirements for the commercial use of the data as well as the time stamps.”
Incidentally, this existing LBMA disclaimer continues with some very out of date text referring to BBA LIBOR. Now there’s a blast from the past…. “Neither the BBA LIBOR Limited, nor the BBA LIBOR Contributor Banks, nor Reuters, nor the LBMA can be held responsible for any irregularity or inaccuracy of BBA LIBOR (for more details, see “Prices Explained”).”
The new LBMA Gold Price has its own disclaimer which is to be found on the new LBMA Gold Price page, and it reads “LBMA Gold Price (“Benchmark”) is owned by The London Bullion Market Association (“LBMA”), calculated and administered by IBA.”
No Way Back
The reason for highlighting that the Gold Fixing web site is being taken offline is that now there will be no way to access it. This is so because it has not been archived in any meaningful way. This is so because the Gold Fixing website
www.goldfixing.com
has a ‘Terms’ page that appeared at the entry page which prevented the Internet Archive / Wayback Machine (
www.archive.org
) from archiving the site’s pages. This means that all of the non-price data on the site disappears when the web site is switched off.
Policy Documents
On the Gold Fixing web site, under a section called ‘Policy Documentation’ there were seven documents, including the Code of Conduct of the Gold Fixing company, the Terms of Reference of the gold fixing Supervisory Committee, the names of the people on the Supervisory Committee, and a document retention policy. For those interested, these documents can be found here:
Terms-of-Reference-for-the-Supervisory-Committee
List-of-Members-of-the-Supervisory-Committee
Code-of-Conduct
Document-Retention-Policy
Policy-on-Complaints-and-Raising-Concerns
Conflicts-of-Interest-Policy
Gold-Contingency-Policy
Under a link called ‘Trading Timeline’ there was a historical Goldfixing-Timeline-PDF.
Under a section called ‘Notices’, there was a Clarification-Document-re-Publication-of-Buy-Sell-Volumes document.
The website also contained an essay about the history of the gold fixing, which I noticed also is on another website here. On the Gold Fixing web site, there had been one small recent addition to this essay to reflect the fact that Deutsche Bank had resigned from the auction. This small addition stated “In May, 2014 Deutsche Bank resigned as a member and the line-up became: Barclays, HSBC, Bank of Nova Scotia Mocatta and Societe Generale.”
The Gold Fixing web site had also prominently displayed the four Members and the most recent chairman, and the logos of the Member banks:
Members gold fixing
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sat Mar 21, 2015 3:19 am