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This page ranks the highest absolute premium and discount readings ever captured on SGE (Shanghai), MCX (India), and LBMA (London) relative to the COMEX benchmark. Extreme readings mark moments of genuine market stress — supply shocks, currency crises, festival demand surges — and understanding when they happened helps put today's number in context.
A premium in the 1–3% range is everyday noise: import duties, refining fees, and the bid-ask spread on local contracts explain most of it. When a premium climbs above 5%, something structural has shifted. Above 10%, the market is in genuine stress.
The clearest historical example is the COVID-19 shock of March 2020. When exchange after exchange suspended floor trading and bullion flights were grounded, the LBMA spot price and the COMEX futures price diverged sharply because physical gold could not physically move to make the arbitrage possible. The COMEX premium over LBMA briefly exceeded 70 USD per ounce — approximately 3% of the gold price at the time.
In India, MCX premiums over COMEX spike reliably in the months preceding Diwali and Akshaya Tritiya, the two largest gold-buying festivals in the world. In years when the Indian rupee depreciates significantly — as it did in 2013 and again in 2022 — the arithmetic of the FX conversion alone can push the rupee-denominated MCX price substantially above the USD benchmark even before cultural demand is added.
On the SGE, premiums above 2–3% typically occur when the People's Bank of China tightens the quota of gold import licences granted to commercial banks. During periods of strict capital control — late 2015 into 2016, for example — the price differential between the SGE and COMEX can persist for weeks at a time, rather than closing within hours as efficient markets would predict.
These extremes are worth recording not because they predict the future, but because they establish a baseline: when you see today's SGE premium at 1.8%, you can compare it against the historical range and draw an informed conclusion about whether conditions are loose or tight. The rankings table below does exactly that.
This site stores one daily snapshot per market per commodity, going back as far as the data pipeline has been running. We cap the rankings view at three years (1,095 days) for two reasons. First, exchange data formats change: the SGE GraphQL schema, the JPX CSV column layout, and the KRX API response fields have each been updated at least once in recent years, and older data collected under a different schema may carry systematic unit or conversion differences that are not visible in the number alone. Second, the structural backdrop itself changes: India revised its gold import duty in 2023, COMEX shifted contract specifications, and LME nickel trading was suspended and restarted. Premium levels that were "normal" under a 2019 market structure may be "extreme" today and vice versa. Three years of data provides a meaningful depth of context without mixing regimes in a misleading way.
A reading of +8.5% means the local market price was 8.5% higher than the COMEX futures price on that day, after converting all currencies to USD per troy ounce. A negative number is a discount.
"Normal" is roughly 0–2%, "High" is 2–5%, and "Extreme" is above 5%. These thresholds are fixed in the calculation engine and do not adjust dynamically — they are descriptive, not normative.
The benchmark price shown is the COMEX active-month futures price on that specific date. It lets you see whether a high premium occurred when gold was cheap or expensive in absolute terms — a 6% premium when gold is at $2,400 is a larger dollar gap than a 6% premium when gold was at $1,200.
The table ranks by the absolute size of the premium reading, so a −7% discount and a +7% premium carry equal weight. This ensures that deep discounts — which also signal market dislocations — appear near the top rather than being hidden at the bottom.
Rankings reflect historical data captured by this site's pipeline. They are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment advice. See our disclaimer for more information.