Gold price methodology

What we track

We collect and store three categories of data throughout the day:

• Local EGP prices for every karat (24, 22, 21, 18, 14) and the local ounce price. The data is collected directly from the Egyptian market, detailed in the next section.
• Global ounce price in USD (London spot, 24K). We use goldapi.io as the source of record, a public API that delivers open, close, and live updates.
• USD/EGP exchange rate. We use exchangerate-api.com to get a live rate at every update. This rate is required to convert the global price (USD) into EGP and compare it with the local price.

Local price source

The local price is drawn from Egyptian market data we aggregate across multiple vendors and sources. Relying on more than one source keeps us running if any single source goes down or changes its format, and it makes the average we publish closer to a true market price rather than one shop's quote.

This mix can evolve as market conditions change: if a source stops publishing, a more accurate source emerges, or the pricing dynamics shift. Our goal is for the number you see to be the best available estimate of the per-gram price in the Egyptian market at that moment, not a particular vendor's listing.

Refresh cadence

We keep every reading in the database, not just the current price. This lets us show price history over any window (week, month, year, since inception) and compute change percentages precisely.

Local-vs-global gap calculation

The premium between the local and the global price is a meaningful indicator of supply and demand pressure in the Egyptian market. We compute it in parallel two ways and show them side-by-side, because consumers think in grams while the global market is priced in ounces:

local_g  = ounce_local_egp / 31.1035
global_g = (ounce_usd × usd_egp) / 31.1035
gap_g    = local_g - global_g

gap_oz = ounce_local_egp
       - (ounce_usd × usd_egp)

The percentage gap is identical either way; only the absolute numbers differ. The percentage is computed as (local − global) / global × 100.

Outage and disruption handling

The global price and exchange rate come from external APIs. If either fails or returns unexpected data, we handle it as follows:

• Carry-forward for the global price: if the global ounce price doesn't arrive (API is down or we hit the monthly quota), we carry the last known price forward and mark it in the UI as "last available."
• Exchange rate is optional: if the rate fails to fetch, we store null and don't compute the gap for that reading. The gap only appears when both the global price and the exchange rate are available, so we don't break the calculation with estimated values.
• Two independent global-API keys: we operate with two separate goldapi.io keys. If the first returns the same price twice in a row (a sign of stale data) or fails outright, we fall back to the second automatically.
• Local price is required: if local-price collection fails, we abort the entire update for that cycle and retry in 30 minutes. We never publish a partial reading.

Editorial transparency

The daily briefs and analyses published here are generated automatically from the real collected price data, with human review by the team before publishing to verify contextual accuracy and interpretation. We don't publish anything without seeing the numbers behind it.

If you spot a number or interpretation that doesn't make sense on any page, let us know and we'll review it right away. Every correction is logged clearly at the bottom of the original article with its date.