LBMA vs COMEX: Why London and New York Prices Can Diverge

The world's gold and silver price is discovered in two centers with fundamentally different architectures.

London (LBMA) is an over-the-counter market: a network of bullion banks trading directly with each other and clients, coordinated by the London Bullion Market Association. The unit of trade is loco London metal: Good Delivery bars sitting in London vaults, settled two business days after a trade. There is no central order book; prices come from dealer quotes. Twice a day for gold (10:30 AM and 3:00 PM London time) and once for silver (12:00 noon), an electronic auction administered by ICE Benchmark Administration produces the LBMA Gold Price and LBMA Silver Price, the reference benchmarks used to settle contracts and value ETFs worldwide. The LBMA also publishes monthly vault holdings data, which we track on our LBMA vault dashboard.

New York (COMEX), part of CME Group, is a centralized futures exchange: standardized contracts (100 oz gold, 5,000 oz silver) trading on a public order book nearly 24 hours a day, with margins, a clearinghouse, and physical delivery via warehouse warrants at approved depositories. COMEX handles enormous volume, most of it never intended for delivery, and its front-month price is the reference for most live price feeds during US hours. Our COMEX hub tracks its prices and warehouse inventory.

Arbitrage. The same bar of metal cannot sustainably cost more in one city than the other by more than the cost of moving or swapping it, so dealers continuously trade the two markets against each other. The main instrument is the EFP (Exchange for Physical): a negotiated swap of COMEX futures exposure for loco London metal, quoted as a spread. When New York gets expensive relative to London, dealers sell futures, buy London bars, and either hold the offsetting positions or physically ship metal west.

Physical shipment is the enforcement mechanism of last resort, and it has real frictions: London Good Delivery gold bars weigh roughly 400 troy ounces and must be recast (typically at Swiss refineries) into the 100 oz or kilo bars COMEX accepts; silver moves in the same 1,000 oz bar form both markets use, but it is heavy and low-value per kilo, so freight is slow and expensive. In quiet times these frictions cost a few dollars per ounce at most and the EFP stays near carry value. The two prices you see quoted rarely differ by more than a few dollars for gold or cents for silver.

Divergence appears when something makes it hard, slow, risky, or expensive to move metal between the two pools. The usual triggers:

Two episodes in 2025 turned this normally invisible plumbing into front-page news, in opposite directions.

Gold, December 2024 to March 2025: New York over London. When US tariff threats raised the possibility that bullion imports could be taxed, holding metal inside the US became suddenly valuable. The gold EFP spiked to roughly $50 per ounce, and the arbitrage machine ran at full speed: a record 151 tonnes of gold left London vaults for New York in January 2025 alone, Swiss refineries recast 400 oz bars into COMEX-deliverable sizes around the clock, and COMEX gold inventories swelled by hundreds of tonnes across the registered and eligible categories. One-month London lease rates touched about 5% as the departing metal thinned London's float. The episode is documented by the World Gold Council and in the LBMA's Q1 2025 market report. The spread collapsed once tariff clarity arrived.

Silver, October 2025: London over New York. The reverse dislocation hit silver later that year. Years of supply deficits plus surging investment demand drained London's available float, and in early October the market seized: one-month silver lease rates surged to an all-time record (roughly 35% on October 9, per Bloomberg data), London spot traded above exchange futures in outright backwardation, and dealers began booking transatlantic airfreight (normally reserved for gold) to fly 1,000 oz bars from New York to London. COMEX silver inventories fell as the metal headed east. Within weeks the response worked: lease rates dropped back to single digits by late October and the curve normalized, but silver had broken its 45-year-old record high along the way.

Both episodes ended the same way, with metal physically moving to wherever it was priced highest. That is the system working, just visibly and expensively.

Both, for different purposes. There is no single canonical price, only a tightly coupled system that usually agrees with itself to within a few dollars.

You do not need a Bloomberg terminal to keep tabs on this system. The public data that matters:

LBMA vault holdings, published monthly, show the level of gold and silver physically held in London; falling silver holdings through 2025 foreshadowed the October squeeze. We chart them on the LBMA gold and LBMA silver pages. COMEX warehouse stocks, published daily by CME Group, show the New York side, split into registered and eligible, on our COMEX silver and COMEX gold pages. Cross-market flows show up as one pool draining while the other fills, exactly the pattern of January 2025 (into New York) and October 2025 (back out toward London).

For the broader picture, our total visible supply dashboard combines exchange inventories in one view, and the Shanghai vs London comparison adds the third major pricing center, where Chinese premiums tell a parallel story about metal location and demand.