Gold in a cash-first book

Most gold marketing on the internet talks in ounces, futures, and “safe haven” slogans. This desk does something narrower. You hold cash. You buy grams. The cash leaves the wallet. The grams show up under Holdings. When you sell, the grams leave and the cash comes back at the desk spot that day. That loop is the whole product. This note explains why we built it that way and how to read the numbers so you are not surprised by the ticket.

Cash is the quote currency

On a leveraged FX screen, gold is often XAU against USD with margin. You can be “in gold” while still sitting on borrowed dollars. That is not this desk. A buy ticket will not open if available cash is short. The button disables, and the form tells you to deposit first. That is deliberate. It keeps the gold sleeve from pretending to be a CFD.

The payment tiles — USDT, Bitcoin, Card, PayPal — are a record of how you want the order tagged. They do not open a second checkout. Settlement is still the cash ledger. If you need more cash, you deposit; you do not invent buying power on the metal ticket.

Grams, not slogans

The minimum order is 0.001g. Quantity chips sit at 1g, 5g, 10g and 50g so you can size without a calculator. Total due is grams × desk spot, rounded to cents. If the admin spot is $85.00 and you buy 10g, you pay $850.00. There is no hidden commission line on that ticket today. If we add one later, it will sit on the order summary, not in a footnote you cannot find.

Holdings subtract completed sales. If you bought 20g and sold 7g, the card should show 13.000g, not 20g of bragging rights. Market value is remaining grams × current spot. Profit and loss is that value minus remaining cost. Pending tickets that never completed do not count as metal you own.

Desk spot is not the chart

The logged-in gold page can show a TradingView gold chart. That widget is a public market picture. Your fill is not that picture. Your fill is the spot stored in gold settings. We say this in the ticket and we say it here because mixing the two is how people get angry at a fill that did exactly what the form printed.

If you care that desk spot tracks a public print, look at the Last price card before you confirm. The confirm dialog repeats quantity and dollars. Cancel if the dollars are not the dollars you meant.

What P&L is trying to say

Unrealised P&L on a completed buy is (grams × current spot) − what you paid. It is not a withdrawal. It does not include deposit fees. If you sold already, that sale is a closed line: cash in, grams out, no living P&L on that slice.

Average cost on the holdings card is remaining net cost divided by remaining grams. After a partial sale we reduce cost by the cash that sale returned, then divide. It is a bookkeeping average, not a tax lot engine. If you need lot-level tax lots, export your order history and do that offline.

Where gold sits next to silver and cash

Gold is the slower, heavier sleeve. Silver’s default chip is 10g because the dollar-per-gram number is smaller. Cash is the buffer that lets you wait. A book that is 100% gold with $0 cash cannot buy a dip and cannot pay a withdrawal without selling metal first. That is not a moral statement. It is the ledger.

Keep a cash buffer. A book that is 100% gold with $0 cash cannot buy a dip and cannot pay a withdrawal without selling metal first.

For the order walkthrough, read Buying and selling gold and silver. For smaller accounts, read Silver versus gold when the ticket is small.