Tamer Elgamil ·
Savers say the buy-back cut is a flat couple of percent that ignores the market. Half of that is right, and this site's own record shows which half costs you money.
Ask a saver in Egypt why the gap between what a shop sells a gram for and what it pays to take one back does not worry them, and you usually get the same answer. It is a fixed cut, two or three percent, and it does not care what the market did that morning.
Half of that is right. The half that is wrong is the half that costs you money on the day you sell.
Be clear about what is being compared, because it decides what any test can prove.
The sell price is recorded from the Egyptian market. One reading per session, for each karat.
The buy-back figure beside it is not a dealer's quote. It is this site's own reference. We set it a flat 100 pounds per gram below the recorded sell price, on every karat and in every session, because no public source publishes a running stream of what individual shops actually bid. The gap in our record never varies because it is a constant we apply, not a spread we measured. Our selling gold back page says so in those words, and the full series sits on our price history page.
A gap of 100 pounds a gram can be read two ways, and the two readings do not behave alike.
In pounds it is flat. That is how it was built.
As a share of the price it moves on its own, even though nobody touched it. When the gram is expensive, 100 pounds is a thin slice of it. When the gram is cheaper, the same 100 pounds is a fatter slice. That is why our 21K page prints the percentage next to the flat figure instead of only one of them.
The gap on its own tells you little. What tells you something is how long it takes to earn back.
Take the gap as a percentage of the price. Divide it by the average size of a daily move in the same record. What comes out is a rough count of sessions the price has to move your way before a buy-then-sell trip returns you to where you started. That is the days-to-clear figure our sell-back page publishes.
Here is where the arithmetic surprises people. Our reference gap does not widen when the market turns rough. So in a stretch where the average daily move is unusually large, that same fixed gap is cleared in fewer sessions, not more. Days to clear falls when the market gets wilder. The top of the fraction never moved. The bottom of it grew.
That is a property of a flat reference. It is not a finding about Egyptian shops, and it would be dishonest to dress it up as one.
Step outside gold for a moment. In ordinary market-making, spreads usually widen exactly when volatility rises. IG's explainer on bid-ask spreads puts it plainly: in periods of high volatility, market makers widen the gap between their buying and selling prices to protect themselves against fast price moves and the extra risk they are carrying. A shop taking metal off your hands on a wild morning faces that same problem.
So the conclusion is not that buy-back gaps in Egypt shrink when the market is rough. The conclusion is that our record cannot tell you what a real counter does, because it never observes a real counter.
It can show you exactly how a fixed reference behaves as the price underneath it moves. It can size the round-trip cost of the metal by itself, before any workmanship.
It cannot tell you whether the shop on your street tightens or widens its own bid when gold is moving fast. Nothing on this site records that, and we are not aware of any source that publishes it session by session for Egypt.
You will usually find the days-to-clear figure is smaller in the rough month. The gap did not change. The market underneath it did.
Ask the shop in front of you for its own buy-back number, and ask for it in pounds per gram rather than as a percentage. A percentage of what is the question that hides the money.
Then compare that figure against the reference on this page, and treat the difference as information about that shop, not about the market.
No. It is this site's own reference, set a flat 100 pounds per gram below the recorded sell price on every karat and in every session, because no public source publishes a running stream of what individual shops bid. Ask a shop directly for its own number before you sell.
In ordinary market-making they usually do. IG's explainer on bid-ask spreads says market makers widen the gap between their buying and selling prices in periods of high volatility, to protect themselves against fast price moves. Our fixed reference cannot show whether any particular Egyptian shop behaves that way, because it does not record dealer quotes at all.
Because it divides a fixed percentage gap by the average size of a daily move. When the average move grows, the same gap is covered by fewer of those larger moves. The gap has not changed. The number underneath it has.
Ask for its own buy-back price, in pounds per gram, for your karat, on that day. A percentage on its own hides what it is a percentage of. Then compare that figure against the reference published on our selling gold back page.