On August 11, 2026, the London Bullion Market Association published a mid-year pulse check. Sixteen professional analysts, polled in July, put gold near $4,500 an ounce at year-end. The high call in that group was $5,100. The low call was $3,879. Their full-year average came in at $4,604. Their average guess for the high in the second half was $4,818. Some of them still saw a second-half high as rich as $5,800. Some still saw a low as poor as $3,450.
That spread is the bigger picture. The average is the middle of a crowd. It is not a promise. By the time those sixteen wrote their numbers down, 2026 had already printed both ends of a violent year. The LBMA said gold hit $5,501.70 on January 29. It said gold hit $3,978.55 on July 1. It said the metal ended July at $4,026.60, down 8.2 percent on the year so far. The average price over those seven months was $4,595.75. A public quote on the weekend of October 10 sat near $4,194. A weekend quote is not an LBMA fix. It is enough to show that the year did not settle on the average. It wandered through it.
This piece has one idea. Do not buy the LBMA average. Underwrite the drivers the analysts refused to drop, and size the position for the range they could not close. The gold price forecast 2026 is a distribution. The gold price outlook is the reason the distribution is wide. A single target is a headline. The range is the risk. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell gold, a fund, a royalty, or a mining share.
What the January crowd thought
The August note looked back at January. It said 28 professional analysts had given the LBMA a full-year average then. The price through July, at $4,595.75, sat about $135 under that January call. Kitco, reporting the January survey, put the consensus average near $4,742 an ounce. The same January exercise, as Kitco described it, ran from a bearish mark near $3,450 to a bullish mark near $7,150. The width of that range was about $3,700. The LBMA’s own launch note in January said 31 analysts took part and that some saw gold through $6,000 and even toward $7,000, with silver talked as high as $160 in the tails.
Hold those two facts together. The crowd’s center was a high four-thousand number. The crowd’s edges were thousands of dollars apart. That is not a quibble about rounding. That is a market in which informed people, looking at the same metal, could not agree on the year within a sum larger than the entire gold price of a decade ago. The LBMA precious metals forecast is prestigious because the people in it work in the trade. Prestige is not precision. The 2025 survey is the proof. The LBMA later showed that the actual average gold price in 2025 was $3,431.54. The analysts’ average forecast for that year had been $2,735.33. The winner, Keisuke Okui of Sumitomo, had been the most bullish at $2,925, and he was still short of the year. Experts can be early, late, and low together. They can also be high together. The job is not to find the person who guessed last year. The job is to see what they all still believe, and what they will not pin down.
The year did not ask permission
Start with the path, because the path humiliates the average. January 29 brought the LBMA’s stated high of $5,501.70. A published closing high that same day has been reported near $5,405. Intraday and close are not the same print. Use the LBMA figure when you are talking about the LBMA. Use a close when you are talking about a close. Either way, the metal was above $5,400 in late January. By July 1 it was under $4,000. That is a drop of roughly $1,500 from the LBMA high to the LBMA low. In percent, it is on the order of 28 percent. The year was not yet half over.
Then the average did its quiet work. Seven months at $4,595.75 can be true while the owner of the metal has been sick. A person who bought the January high and held through July did not experience $4,596. That person experienced a drawdown. A person who bought the July low and still holds a weekend quote near $4,194 has a gain and still sits far under the high. The average is a statistic about time. A portfolio is a statistic about the dates you chose. The LBMA gold forecast 2026 is useful only if you remember which of those two statistics you are allowed to spend.
The August revision was the crowd catching up to the path. The full-year average they would now sign was $4,604, close to what the year had already averaged. The year-end figure they would sign was $4,500. That is a modest rise from the end of July, and a modest rise from a weekend quote near $4,194, if you treat the quote as a rough mark and not as a trade. It is also a long way from $5,502, and a long way from $7,150. The future of gold prices, in this survey, is not a moonshot restated. It is a center that moved down, and a right tail that did not die. Highs in the second half were still penciled from $4,872 to $5,800. The low case was still $3,450. Gold market volatility is not a footnote to that table. It is the table.
The drivers did not resign
Here is the sentence in the August note that matters more than $4,500. The list of drivers had not materially changed since January. Geopolitics, notably in the Middle East. U.S. inflation. The Federal Reserve’s direction. Central bank buying. What changed was the emphasis. More weight now sat on the Fed under what the LBMA called the new leadership of Kevin Warsh. Of the sixteen, five named Iran as the first concern. One named the continuing appetite of central banks. The rest named the Fed and the inflation numbers it must answer.
Read that as a gold market analysis, not as a vote. Eleven of sixteen had moved their eyes to interest rates and gold, and to the person they believe will set the tone. Five still thought a war, or the risk of a wider one, could dominate a model. One still thought official demand was the hinge. Nobody in that summary stood up and said the old drivers were finished. They stood up and argued about which one would bite first. That argument is the gold market outlook 2026. A market that agrees on the forces and disagrees on the price is a market that will gap when one force wins a month. Gaps are how a year travels from $5,502 to $3,979 without tearing up the shopping list of reasons.
The individual notes filed at the start of the year show the same split in plainer clothes. Suki Cooper of Standard Chartered put a range of $3,700 to $5,500 around an average near $4,788. She said the structural bid was intact. Geopolitical risk. Worry about Fed independence. Rising U.S. debt. Trade uncertainty. De-dollarization. Currency debasement. She pointed to exchange-traded product flows of more than 750 tonnes in 2025, the strongest tonnage since 2020 on her account, and to central banks that kept buying at record prices. She added an anecdote, and she marked it as one. Family offices, she said, still looked light, at perhaps 1 to 2 percent in gold against targets of 5 to 10 percent. A more benign economy, or a Fed that intervened, could cut the rally. If official buying and portfolio allocations slowed, the floor would soften. That is a forecast with a trap door. The trap door is the point.
Bart Melek of TD Securities was tighter and cooler. His range was $3,920 to $4,775. His average was $4,213. He expected a range-bound year with upside risk early, a first-half quarterly average as high as $4,400, and a trading high around $4,750, helped by geopolitics from Venezuela and Iran and by worry over Fed independence and U.S. debt. He also said a weaker economy, less inflation, and the end of an easing cycle could pull the metal back under the highs later. The year then traded above his high and kissed his low. A careful range can still be too narrow. His value to an investor is not the $4,213. It is the mechanism. Early strength, later consolidation, if the rate path turns dull. The gold price drivers he named are testable. You can watch the curve. You cannot deposit his average.
Jacob Smith of Metals Focus was on the high side of the January pack. His range was $3,900 to $5,800. His average was $5,100. He said gold could climb through 2026 on conflict, on a debasement trade, and on Fed independence, with dips as chances to add if central banks kept buying. He described 2025 as an exceptional 65 percent rally, the strongest year since 1979, and he expected the pace to cool without the direction reversing. Treat the 65 percent as his description of the move he had in mind, not as the LBMA’s average-price change. The LBMA’s own averages rose from $2,386.20 in 2024 to $3,431.54 in 2025. That is a huge year for the mean. It is not the same statistic as a trough-to-peak rally. Quote the man. Do not weld his percent to a different series.
Central banks are a bid, not a calendar
Central bank gold buying is the driver that sounds the most solid, and it is the one most often turned into a fairy tale. A central bank does not buy because a newsletter is bullish. It buys because a reserve manager wants an asset that is no one else’s liability. That motive survived the spike and the slump. Cooper said the buying did not fade at record prices. The August survey still listed it. Only one of sixteen called it the primary worry, which is itself a fact. Official demand can be the floor under the market and still lose the argument about what moves the price this month. A floor is not a trend. A trend is what the other fifteen were fighting over.
Central bank gold reserves are also slow. They are measured in tonnes accumulated over years, not in a Friday quote. A reserve manager who missed $5,500 did not have to chase it. A reserve manager who wanted ounces in July could buy a break. The gold demand trends that matter here are not jewelry seasons. They are whether official buyers stay in the market when the price is falling, and whether they step back when it is screaming. The LBMA analysts, taken as a group, did not retire this bid in July. They also did not pretend it sets the Tuesday print. Central bank demand for gold is a reason the long-term floor has risen. It is not a reason to ignore a 28 percent drawdown. If the bid pauses, Cooper’s own warning applies. The floor softens. An investor who treated official buying as a law will meet that pause as a surprise. It is not a surprise. It is the clause she already wrote.
Rates are the new emphasis, not a new metal
Interest rates and gold still do the old work. Gold pays no coupon. When real yields rise, the metal has to earn its place as insurance. When real yields fall, the insurance looks cheap. The August survey said the emphasis had shifted toward the Fed, and toward Warsh. That is a change in weight, not a change in physics. A new chair does not repeal the opportunity cost of holding a bar. A new chair can change how fast the market believes the cost will move.
The split inside the sixteen is a clean lesson. Most of them thought the next leg would be decided by inflation prints and by the reaction at the Fed. Five thought Iran could overrule the prints. Both can be true in different months. A hot inflation number can knock gold down if the market decides rates stay high. A headline from the Gulf can knock gold up before the number is even released. The gold price momentum of a given week is often just the winner of that argument. The gold long-term outlook is the fact that both arguments are still live. Investors who need one story will get whipsawed. Investors who can hold two stories will still lose money if they size as if only one can happen. The range from $3,450 to $5,800 in the second-half calls is the market’s way of saying both stories fit inside 2026.
Melek’s version is the most useful for a calendar. Strength while the market still prices easier policy and political pressure on the central bank. A fade if the easing cycle ends and inflation cools. You do not have to adopt his $4,213 to use the sequence. You have to notice where you are in it. By October, the year has already had the spike, the break, and a grind back above $4,100 on public quotes. That is not his script performed on time. It is a wilder script with his plot still visible underneath. The Fed can still be the emphasis. The path can still embarrass the plot.
Iran is five votes, not a model
Five of sixteen analysts put Iran first. That is not a majority. It is a large minority in a room that sets the tone for a global benchmark. Global economic uncertainty, in this survey, is not a vague cloud. It has a name, and the name is a conflict that can move oil, the dollar, and the bid for insurance on the same morning. The January notes already had the Middle East and Venezuela on the page, before the year’s worst swing. The August note said the list had not changed. The price had. A driver that survives a $1,500 round trip is a structural driver. A driver that explains every tick is a story you tell after the tick.
For an investor, the practical point is cruel and simple. You cannot hedge a war with a year-end average. You can decide how much of a portfolio you are willing to see marked down 28 percent while you wait to learn whether the war premium comes back. The LBMA high of $5,501.70 already included a great deal of fear. The July low already included a great deal of that fear leaving. Buying “geopolitics” at the high is not the same trade as owning gold because official buyers and debt stocks do not vanish when a headline fades. The first trade needs the headline to keep getting worse. The second trade needs the structure to remain. The survey, read honestly, supports the second more than the first. Five analysts still lead with Iran. The document as a whole leads with a list that is older than this war’s latest chapter.
De-dollarization is a reserve story, not a Tuesday trade
De-dollarization and gold belong in the same paragraph as Cooper’s list, and they need a brake. A shift in reserves away from a single currency is a decade-scale choice. It shows up as tonnes in a vault and as a smaller share of dollars in a portfolio. It does not show up as a guarantee that gold rises every quarter. The word is used too often as a trumpet. Used properly, it is one reason central banks were willing to buy at prices that looked extreme to a 2023 eye. Used loosely, it becomes an excuse to hold through any drawdown because the dollar is “ending.” The dollar did not end between January and July. Gold fell anyway.
The honest version helps the gold investment outlook more than the trumpet does. If reserve managers and private allocators are still short of their own targets, dips have a buyer who is not a tourist. Cooper’s family-office anecdote is exactly that claim, and she labeled it anecdotal. Anecdotes are not tonnes. They are a hypothesis you can watch. If private allocations move from 1 or 2 percent toward the middle of a 5 to 10 percent target, the bid is real and it is large. If they do not, the anecdote was a hope. De-dollarization, on this reading, is a possible flow. It is not a moral victory. Gold market trends 2026 include that flow only to the extent the flow prints. Until it prints, it is a reason the left tail may be bought, not a reason the left tail cannot happen. The left tail in this survey is $3,450. That number is still on the page.
Demand is more than a bar in a vault
Gold demand trends in a year like this arrive in layers. Official buying is one layer. Exchange-traded products are another. Cooper’s 750-tonne figure for 2025 ETP flows, if you take it as her research and not as a law, says Western and institutional money already came in size before this year’s spike. Flows that large can reverse. They can also pause and then return. Jewelry demand usually suffers when the price runs. Scrap supply usually rises when holders decide the price is a gift. Those two forces lean against the rally at the highs and lean with it at the lows, because scrap dries up when the price scares sellers and jewelry wakes up when the price gives them air. The average price hides that switch. The path reveals it. Above $5,000, the marginal seller is a person taking profit. Near $4,000, the marginal buyer may be a reserve desk or a fund that missed the first move. The LBMA year-end cluster near $4,500 sits between those two regimes. It is a plausible resting place. It is not a magnet the market must obey.
Investment demand and official demand can also crowd each other. If central banks and ETPs buy the same dip, the rebound is sharp. If both step back, the air pocket is sharp. July looked more like an air pocket than like a queue of eager buyers. October’s quotes, back above $4,100, look more like a market that found a bid without reclaiming the story of January. Gold price momentum, in that sequence, changed sign twice. Momentum is a description of the last move. It is not a driver. The drivers are still the Fed, the war risk, and the official bid. Momentum is what you get after one of them wins a week.
The average is a bad order ticket for miners
A miner does not sell the LBMA average. A miner sells the gold it pours, on the days it pours, into a market that just proved it can drop $1,500. The gold miners outlook is therefore a leveraged version of the range, not a leveraged version of $4,500. Operating costs do not fall 28 percent because the metal did. A company with costs in the low thousands still makes money at $4,000. It makes a great deal more at $5,500. The difference is margin, and margin is where equity prices live. Gold mining stocks 2026 will not track the survey’s mean. They will track the surprise versus the cost base, the hedge book if there is one, and the market’s mood about the next surprise.
That is why gold mining investment opportunities are not a list of tickers dressed up as destiny. They are a set of questions. What gold price is already in the stock. What happens to cash flow at $3,800. What happens at $5,200. How much of next year’s gold is already sold forward. How long the reserves last if the mill runs full. Whether the balance sheet needs the high case in order to pay its debts. A stock that only works at the January tail is not an investment in the LBMA’s bigger picture. It is a bet that the right tail returns and stays. The survey itself, even in its bullish cells, includes a low of $3,450. A miner that cannot live there is not underwriting the same document the bulls are waving.
Gold royalty companies sit one step off that operating risk. They own a slice of revenue or of metal, not the diesel bill and the pit wall. A royalty can still disappoint. The mine can miss. The counterparty can struggle. The slice can be small. What a royalty usually avoids is the full operating leverage that turns a 10 percent move in gold into a 30 percent move in earnings, both directions. In a year this wide, that dullness is a feature. It is not a coupon. Royalty shares still fall when the metal falls. They should fall less than a high-cost producer if the contract is clean and the mines keep running. They are not gold in a vault. They are a contract on someone else’s gold. The gold investment opportunities in that corner of the market are about contract quality and mine life, not about guessing whether year-end is $4,500 or $5,100. If you need the high number for the royalty to make sense, you do not own a royalty. You own a call option with extra steps.
Juniors are the range, amplified
Junior gold mining stocks are where the LBMA range goes to become a story about a drill hole. A junior often has no mine, no cash flow, and a treasury that empties on a schedule. Gold at $4,500 does not put ounces in the box. It changes how easily the next financing gets done, and at what price per share. In a tape that runs to $5,500, money is loose and dilution can be light. In a tape that prints $3,979, the same hole can be a good hole and a bad financing. Canadian junior gold miners know this cycle in their bones. The TSXV is built for it. TSXV gold stocks can double on a hit and halve on a silence, with the bullion price only the weather around the hole.
Gold exploration stocks are a claim on rocks plus a claim on the market’s willingness to fund the next claim. The bigger picture from the LBMA does not pick the rocks. It tells you the weather will stay violent. A violent gold price is good for headlines and bad for treasuries that were modeled on a gentle uptrend. If you own an explorer, the LBMA average is almost irrelevant. The relevant numbers are months of cash, the grade you can defend, the jurisdiction that can stop you, and whether the next raise happens nearer $4,000 or nearer $5,000. Gold stocks to watch, in this part of the market, are the ones that can still drill if the low case in the survey shows up. The ones that need the high case to keep the lights on are not watching the bigger picture. They are watching the right tail and hoping it is a forecast.
None of this is a list. A list would pretend that a survey of bullion analysts is a research report on a Canadian hillside. It is not. The transmission is only this. A wide bullion range widens the equity range. Seniors widen less than juniors. Royalties widen less than producers, most of the time, if the contracts are good. Explorers widen most. Position size is how you respect that order. A junior sized like a bar of gold is a misunderstanding of both.
Canada is a market, not a thesis
Canadian gold stocks are a large share of the world’s listed miners and explorers. That is a fact about where the companies chose to list. It is not a fact about the LBMA average. A company can be Canadian, competent, and still priced for a gold market that the sixteen analysts do not agree on. Canadian gold stocks deserve the same test as any other. Cash costs. Balance sheet. Reserve life. Jurisdiction of the actual rocks, which may not be in Canada at all. The passport of the head office does not hedge a mill in West Africa or a permit in the Andes.
The reason to mention them in the same breath as the LBMA gold forecast 2026 is liquidity and access. Many investors meet gold through a Toronto listing, a royalty listed in Canada, or a TSXV quote they can buy in a small account. Access is not analysis. A liquid stock can still be the wrong price. An illiquid TSXV name can still be the right rocks. The survey does not speak to either. It speaks to the metal those shares pretend to offer in concentrated form. If the metal’s own experts will not stand inside a $500 band, a stock that offers “upside to our target” inside a tighter band is selling confidence the benchmark does not have.
How to read the number without obeying it
There is a disciplined way to use a survey like this. Write down the center. The August center is a full-year average of $4,604 and a year-end figure of $4,500. Write down the edges the same people were willing to sign. Year-end from $3,879 to $5,100 in the snapshot. Second-half extremes from $3,450 to $5,800. January’s outer tales went further, toward $7,150 on Kitco’s account of the high and $3,450 on the low. Then ask a rude question. What breaks at the low edge. What changes at the high edge. If your reason for owning gold, or a miner, or a royalty, only works near the high edge, you do not own the bigger picture. You own a scenario. Scenarios are allowed. They should be sized like scenarios. Small. Explicit. Able to go to zero in the mind before they go to zero in the account.
The center still has a job. It stops you from treating today’s quote as destiny. A weekend mark near $4,194 sits under the year-end cluster of $4,500 and under the full-year mean the year has already been running. That gap is not a trade signal. It is a reminder that the crowd, in July, thought the latter part of the year would not stay on the floor. They also thought it would not go back to January without a new high in the tale. You can disagree. If you disagree, disagree with a driver. Say you think official buying stops. Say you think the Fed hikes for real and real yields jump. Say you think the war premium is gone and will not return. Those are arguments. “I like the average” is not an argument. The average is what you get when you blend the arguments and throw away the disagreement. The disagreement is the information.
Last year’s miss belongs on the same page. The 2025 crowd was low. The actual mean beat the forecast mean by roughly $700. A crowd that was low can become a crowd that is high. The August cut, from a January call near $4,740 down toward a $4,604 mean and a $4,500 year-end, is the crowd marking itself to a harsher tape. It can mark itself again. Forecasts are not assets. They are opinions with dates on them. The LBMA will judge the January forecasts against the actual 2026 average and name winners in January 2027. Until that average exists, every figure in the survey is a guess with a pedigree. Pedigree is not custody.
What you can underwrite
You can underwrite the path that already happened. A high near $5,502 on the LBMA’s page. A low near $3,979. Seven months averaging about $4,596. A year-end vote, taken in the fear of July, centered near $4,500. A weekend indication in October near $4,194, which you should replace with a real fix before you trade. Those are facts of different strength. The LBMA prints are the strong ones. The weekend quote is a signpost.
You can underwrite the stability of the driver list. War, inflation, the Fed, official buying. Emphasis shifted toward rates and a new Fed leadership. The list did not shrink. That is the bigger picture the experts actually share. Gold price drivers that survive a crash are the ones worth a long-term slot. Drivers that only work at the high are trading ideas.
You can underwrite dispersion as a risk budget. If serious people still publish lows at $3,450 and highs at $5,800 for the back half of one year, a portfolio that cannot tolerate a move of that size should not be concentrated in the metal, and it should be even less concentrated in miners. Gold market volatility of this kind is not a bug in the forecast. It is the forecast. The mean is a courtesy to people who need one number for a slide.
You can underwrite a hierarchy of vehicles, not a hierarchy of tips. Metal first if what you want is the bar. Royalties if what you want is a thinner slice of operating chaos. Producers if you want leverage and can read a cost curve. Developers and explorers if you want the range amplified and you can read a cash balance. Canadian listings are a doorway. They are not a quality stamp. Junior gold mining stocks and TSXV gold stocks are where the doorway gets narrow and the swings get wide.
You cannot underwrite $4,500 as a destination. You cannot underwrite $5,100 as the bull case you are owed. You cannot underwrite $7,150 as anything but a tail that was on a January page. You cannot underwrite Cooper’s family-office gap as tonnes. You cannot underwrite Melek’s band as a fence the price must respect. It has already stepped outside it. You cannot underwrite a miner’s presentation that uses the LBMA average as a base case and leaves the low case in an appendix. The appendix is where this year lived for a while.
What would make this reading wrong
The reading is wrong if the rest of 2026 pins gold in a tight band around $4,500 and the range collapses because the drivers finally agree. Then the average was the picture, and the drama of January and July was a finished accident. You would still have been right to demand a low-case test. You would have been wrong to treat the width as a permanent fact. Watch the band. If it narrows and stays narrow, the crowd found a price. This article bets that they have not, because their own July answers still span more than $2,000 from the cautious low to the hopeful high.
The reading is wrong if official buying stops cold and private flows follow it out, and the structural list on the August page turns out to have been habit. Then the bigger picture was the air pocket, not the driver list. Cooper wrote that risk down. It remains open. A few quiet months from reserve managers would not settle it. A clear, sustained step back would.
The reading is wrong if you came here for a stock to buy. The survey is not a stock. The transmission from a bullion average to a share price runs through costs, hedges, politics, and dilution. Skipping those steps is how people turn a London poll into a Toronto loss. The poll can still be “right” on the mean while the stock is wrong. Means do not pay capex. Cash does.
The idea, once
LBMA experts, sixteen of them in July and a larger room in January, see a gold market that still rests on war risk, inflation, the Federal Reserve, and central bank buying. They translated that picture into a year-end average near $4,500 and a full-year average near $4,604. The same institution recorded a 2026 high of $5,501.70 and a low of $3,978.55. January’s room had tails from roughly $3,450 to roughly $7,150. Named analysts disagreed in public. Cooper’s center sat near $4,788 with a structural bid and a trap door. Melek’s center sat near $4,213 with an early peak and a later fade. Smith’s center sat near $5,100 with dips as opportunities if official buying held. The price then ignored the neatness of all three.
The bigger picture is not the average. The bigger picture is a crowd that shares the drivers and will not share a price. What that could mean for an investor is plain. Underwrite the drivers. Size for the range. Do not spend the mean as if it were a bid. Gold can finish the year near the cluster. It can also visit either edge again. The survey already said so. The year already did.
A note on sources and limits
The August 11, 2026 LBMA snapshot is the source for the sixteen analysts, the $4,500 year-end average, the $5,100 and $3,879 year-end marks, the $4,604 full-year figure, the $4,818 average second-half high, the $4,872 to $5,800 high range, the $3,450 low, the $5,501.70 January 29 high, the $3,978.55 July 1 low, the $4,026.60 end-July price, the 8.2 percent decline, the $4,595.75 seven-month average, the “about $135” gap versus the January poll of 28 analysts, and the driver split that put Iran first for five respondents, central banks first for one, and the Fed and inflation first for the rest. Kitco’s August 12 report is the source for the January consensus average near $4,741.97 and for the January forecast span it described from about $3,450 to about $7,150. The LBMA’s January 20, 2026 launch note is the source for the count of 31 analysts and for talk of $6,000 and $7,000 gold in the tails. The LBMA’s 2025 forecast review is the source for the 2025 actual average of $3,431.54, the 2025 forecast average of $2,735.33, the 2024 average of $2,386.20, and Okui’s winning $2,925. Cooper, Melek, and Smith are quoted from their 2026 forecast pages on the LBMA site. Their ranges and averages are theirs. A weekend gold indication near $4,194 on October 10, 2026 comes from public quote pages and is not an LBMA fix. Kevin Warsh is described as Fed leadership only in the sense the LBMA’s August note used that frame.
Forecasts are opinions. They are not offers, promises, or advice. Gold and gold-linked shares can fall hard, including through the low cases cited here. Royalty contracts can fail. Junior miners can dilute or go to zero. This article does not recommend any security, fund, coin, or strategy. It is not a solicitation. Readers should read the LBMA pages themselves and should speak with a licensed adviser before any decision.