Understanding the result
What each line of an item’s calculation means, why a buyer pays less than melt, what “Not priced” means, and why values change during the day.
Updated
By the end of this page you can read every line of an item’s calculation and know what the number is, and what it is not. About five minutes.
Open the breakdown
Every priced card has a How was this calculated? button along its bottom edge. Press it and the card expands to show the rows below; Hide calculation folds them away. Items added by Try an example item have one too.
- 1Metal weight, net of stones
- 2Price per gram of the alloy
- 3Metal value
- 4Gem value
- 5Total
Row by row
The rows for a piece of jewelry, with a 5 g 14K ring and gold at $2,400 per troy ounce as the example:
| Row | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Metal weight (net of stones/other) | The weight you entered, converted to grams, minus the weight of every stone and any other material. This is the metal that gets priced. It never goes below zero. | 5.00 g |
| Gold 14K price per gram | The spot price per troy ounce divided by 31.1035 to get a price per gram, times the share of the alloy that is gold. Every metal in the alloy that has a spot price is added up this way; the rest of the alloy is worth nothing here. | $2,400 ÷ 31.1035 = $77.16 per gram of pure gold; × 58.3% = $44.99 per gram |
| Metal value | Net metal weight × price per gram. | 5.00 g × $44.99 = $224.93 |
| Gem value | The sum of every stone that has a price. Only diamonds can have one, from your gem value matrix; every other stone counts as $0 here. | $0.00 |
| Total | Metal value plus gem value. | $224.93 |
Two more rows appear only with WITVT Pro settings: Purity hedging, shown as a percentage that is already included in the price per gram, and Price multiplier, applied to the total. See Pro pricing controls below.
Coins
A coin’s breakdown has two values. Melt value prices the coin’s fine metal content, using the published fine weight from the catalog when there is one. Numismatic value is the catalog’s guide price for that issue at the grade you chose. The total is the higher of the two: a worn common-date silver dollar is worth its silver, a scarce date in high grade is worth its guide price.
Melt value versus an offer
Everything in WITVT is melt value: what the metal itself is worth at today’s market price. Nobody who buys from you pays exactly that. A refiner has to melt and assay the metal and keep a margin; a pawn shop or gold buyer adds its own margin on top and carries the risk that the hallmark is wrong. Offers of 60 to 90% of melt are normal, with the best prices for larger lots of clearly marked gold and the lowest for small, mixed or unmarked pieces.
Use the number as your anchor. It tells you what “80% of melt” actually is, which is the question to ask any buyer.
Pro pricing controls
What “Not priced” means
You can meet it in three places.
- On a card. The item has not been calculated yet. With Live off, press Calculate updated values. If the spot bar shows Unavailable for the item’s metal there is no price to calculate with; try again later.
- On a stone. A diamond shows “Not priced: check gem matrix” when no active value matrix covers it: there is no matrix for its cut, its carat weight falls outside every range you set up, or its clarity or colour is not set. The stone still reduces the metal weight; it just adds $0, so the item total is conservative rather than wrong. Stones other than diamonds are never priced.
- On a coin. The numismatic row says “no guide price” when the coin was entered by hand, has no grade, or the catalog has no price for that issue and grade. The melt value stands on its own.
Why the number moves during the day
Spot prices change all day while markets are open. WITVT takes its quotes from a commercial market-data feed, in US dollars per troy ounce, and updates them through the day; each card in the spot bar says when its quote was taken. The Metals page shows today’s prices and their history.
A value in your workspace reflects the prices at the moment it was last calculated, not necessarily the ones in the spot bar now. With Live on, every edit recalculates the whole workspace, so adding, changing or duplicating an item brings everything up to date. To refresh without changing anything, turn Live off, press Calculate in the toolbar, then turn it back on. The report uses the values in the workspace at the time you open it.
How accurate is this?
The arithmetic is exact for what you entered. The uncertainty is in the inputs:
- Weight. A kitchen scale can be off by 0.1 g, which is 2% of a 5 g ring; a scale that reads to 0.01 g brings that down to a fraction of a percent.
- Purity. Hallmarks can overstate purity, and some pieces are plated rather than solid. Only an acid test or XRF settles it. Plumb marks such as 14KP are guaranteed to be at least the stamped purity.
- What is not metal. Stones you did not enter, solder joints, springs in clasps and enamel all add weight without adding gold. Enter every stone, and expect the real metal content of a complicated piece to be a little lower than shown.
Weigh carefully, enter every stone, and treat the result as a well-founded estimate of melt value rather than a quote. Value your first item covers the inputs step by step.
Related
- Value your first item in two minutes: Add a piece of jewelry step by step: type, details, hallmark and weight, stones, review, and the priced card at the end.
- Welcome to WITVT: What WITVT measures, what it leaves out, the three screens you will use, and where your work is kept.
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