Barclays £26 million

The five participating banks are market makers. They may have gold orders on their own behalf (proprietary trading), their clients' behalf (brokerage), or frequently some of each. Client orders will generally be limit orders. A buy limit order is executed unless the price is above a preset value. A sell limit order is executed unless the price is below a preset value.

The lead participant will begin the fixing process by proposing a price near the current gold spot price. The participants then simulate the result of trading at that price. The simulations do not merely factor physical gold, but include gold trading contracts ("Paper Gold") which are marginally backed and which therefore inflate market volumes and alter the supply/demand valuation formulas that would otherwise apply to the physical gold commodity.

price was US$19.3990

In April 2004 N M Rothschild & Sons announced that it planned to withdraw from gold trading and from the London gold fixing. Barclays Capital took its place on 7 June 2004 and the chairmanship of the meeting, formerly held permanently by Rothschilds, now rotates annually.

On 28 June 2012, an employee of Barclays manipulated the gold fixing process to prevent a derivative product previously sold to a client from leading to a payout. The employee, and subsequently Barclays, self-reported the incident.^[5]

In January 2014, Deutsche Bank withdrew from the panels setting the gold and silver fixings.^[6]

On 23 May 2014 the Financial Conduct Authority announced it had fined Barclays £26 million for systems and controls failures, and conflict of interest in relation to the gold fixing over the nine years to 2013, and for manipulation of the gold price on 28 June 2012.^[7]