Where the prices come from

By the end of this page you know what the numbers in the spot bar are, how they turn into the value of a 14K ring, when they change, and what to make of “Unavailable”.

Spot prices

The four cards above the workspace are spot prices: the market price for immediate delivery of gold, silver, platinum and palladium, in US dollars per troy ounce. WITVT takes its quotes from a commercial market-data feed. The prices of copper, nickel and zinc are fetched as well, so the base metals in an alloy can be priced, but they are too small to show in the bar.

Each card shows the price, a chip with the change since the previous quote, and As of with the time the quote was taken, in UTC. Tap a card to open that metal’s history.

From an ounce to your item

Three steps turn a spot price into the value of a piece of jewelry:

1. Per gram. A troy ounce is 31.1035 g, so the price per gram of pure metal is the spot price divided by 31.1035. (A regular ounce is 28.35 g; market prices are never quoted in those.)
2. Per gram of your alloy. Multiply by the alloy’s share of each metal: 14K gold is 58.3% gold, so its price per gram is 58.3% of the pure figure, plus whatever the other metals in the alloy are worth. That is the “price per gram” row in an item’s breakdown and the headline on every alloy page.
3. Times the metal weight. The net weight of metal, after stones, times the price per gram. Understanding the result walks through an example with real numbers.

Pennyweight prices, common in the US trade, are the per-gram figure times 1.555. The alloy pages show all three: per gram, per pennyweight and per troy ounce.

How often prices refresh

A background job fetches new quotes on a schedule through the day and stores every one, which is what the history charts are drawn from. Pages read the latest stored quote through a short cache, so the spot bar is at most a few minutes behind the newest quote. Precious metals trade around the clock on weekdays; over the weekend the quotes stand still, and the “As of” time shows how old they are.

The values in your workspace do not update on their own. They reflect the prices at the moment of the last calculation, so after a break turn Live off and on again, or press Calculate, to reprice everything at today’s quotes.

History pages

Each metal has a page under Metals with a chart of its stored quotes over the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or 90 days. The longer ranges show one point per day. Use it to see whether today is a high or a low before you sell, and to check that the quote the workspace used is current.

Alloy pages

Alloy prices lists every common alloy, gold from 9K to 24K, silver from 800 to 999, platinum from 800 to 999 and the US coinage alloys, with today’s value per gram. Each alloy has its own page with the composition, the hallmarks it is usually stamped with, a scrap value table for common weights, and an Add to workspace button that opens the wizard with that alloy selected.

What “Unavailable” means

A card showing Unavailable and “No recent quote” means WITVT has no stored quote for that metal right now, usually because the price feed or its storage could not be reached. Items that contain that metal are priced without it until a quote returns: a gold ring would show $0.00 of metal value, not an error. Nothing is lost; the next calculation after the quote returns prices it again. Troubleshooting says what to do in the meantime.