Gold

Gold futures, traded on the CME Group's COMEX division under the ticker GC, are the world's primary venue for institutional gold-price discovery. The standard GC contract is sized at 100 troy ounces of gold (priced in USD per ounce), so one contract represents approximately $340,000 of underlying exposure at current price levels. Smaller micro contracts (MGC, 10 troy ounces) and mini contracts (QO, 50 troy ounces) exist for retail-scale exposure.

Gold occupies a unique role in the global financial system: it is simultaneously a safe-haven monetary asset (held by central banks as part of foreign-exchange reserves), an industrial input (jewellery, dental, semiconductor), an inflation hedge, and a speculative trading vehicle. For Indian retail investors, gold is also culturally central — India and China together account for roughly 50% of annual global gold demand. The COMEX gold-futures price, refreshed continuously during US futures hours, is the price reference used by the World Gold Council and by Indian bullion exchanges (MCX) for setting domestic INR-denominated rates.

Gold futures launched on COMEX (then a separate New York exchange) on 31 December 1974, the same day President Gerald Ford signed legislation re-legalising private gold ownership for US citizens (it had been banned since 1933). Trading began at $185.25 per troy ounce. Gold peaked at $850 in January 1980 during the Iranian-revolution / inflation crisis, then entered a 20-year bear market that took it to $250 by 1999. The new bull market began in 2001 and took gold to an all-time high of $1,921 in September 2011. After a 4-year correction to $1,050, gold has been in a renewed bull market through the 2020s, breaking $2,000 in 2020, $2,400 in 2024, and reaching new all-time highs above $4,000 in 2025-26 driven by central-bank buying, de-dollarisation themes and inflation hedging.

Major COMEX gold drawdowns: 1980-1999 (-71% from peak), 2011-2015 (-45%). Despite these long drawdowns, gold has delivered roughly 8-9% annualised USD returns since 1971 — competitive with the S&P 500 once the dividend gap is accounted for in inflation-adjusted terms.

COMEX gold trades nearly 24 hours, Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, on CME Globex. In IST:

Three lenses for reading gold. First, US real yields (10-year TIPS yields): gold has a strong -0.6 to -0.8 correlation with real yields on rolling-90-day data. When real yields rise, gold typically falls (the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding gold rises). Second, the US dollar index (DXY): gold is USD-priced, so a weaker dollar is usually bullish for gold and vice versa. Third, central-bank purchasing data: World Gold Council publishes quarterly central-bank net-buying data; sustained large central-bank buying (notably by China, Russia, Turkey, India and Poland through 2022-25) creates an underlying bid.

For Indian investors, gold price in INR depends on both the COMEX USD price and the USD/INR exchange rate. A flat COMEX gold + falling rupee combination still results in rising INR gold prices — a common feature in recent years.