How melt value works

The whole method: two inputs, one multiplication, no surprises.

Every number on this site is the same arithmetic: metal content × spot price. This page documents both inputs.

Prices

Gold and silver come from Swissquote's public quote feed - the mid-point of the best bid and ask for spot XAU/USD and XAG/USD - refreshed on every build. If that feed is unavailable, the build falls back to the COMEX front-month futures close (via Yahoo Finance) and the site labels the source accordingly; the two typically sit within about a percent of each other. Copper is the COMEX front-month price in dollars per pound. Nickel and zinc (for the base-metal pages) are the IMF's global monthly benchmarks via FRED, labelled monthly where used.

Coin content

Weights and fineness are U.S. Mint specifications - constants set by statute for each series. Pure content (ASW/AGW) is recomputed as weight × fineness ÷ 31.1035 on every build and cross-checked against published references; a drift larger than 0.5% aborts the build rather than publishing a wrong number.

What this site deliberately does not publish

No dealer buy/sell prices (spreads vary too much to state honestly), no numismatic valuations (that is an appraisal, not arithmetic), no price predictions, and no "premium" estimates. When a figure is a market convention rather than mint data - the 0.715 ozt-per-dollar circulated convention, for instance - the page says so.

Freshness

Every page carries the exact price and UTC timestamp used. If an upstream source fails, the previous day's pages stay live rather than rendering partial data; price history rides a cached copy through outages but the build aborts if that cache is more than three weeks stale.

Questions or corrections: contact@meltvaluecheck.com.