Dollars an ounce, pounds a point, or a price with a month attached. The metal is identical and the three numbers cannot be laid side by side.
One metal, three tickets, no common unit
Ask three FCA-regulated platforms what it costs to trade gold and you get three answers in three units. One quotes the metal against the dollar, priced per ounce, with the dealing charge in cents. One quotes points and asks how many pounds a point you wish to stake. One quotes a named delivery month, which is a different number from spot on purpose. Same bar in the vault, three times.
The damage happens in the comparison, not in the market
On a desk that is unremarkable, because everyone knows which book they are sitting on. In a retail comparison it does damage, since the three arrive on one screen under a single heading and the reader picks the smallest figure. The convention decides what you type, what your exposure is, and what the charge is measured in.
Gold quoted as a currency pair
The spot contract for difference handles gold the way it handles sterling against the dollar. The price is dollars per troy ounce, you deal in ounces, and the dealing charge is the gap between bid and offer expressed in cents an ounce. It multiplies by the ounces you hold and by nothing else. Every field on that ticket is ounces or dollars.
A British account holder pays for that twice. Profit and loss arrives in dollars and has to become sterling, so the rate applied on closing forms part of the cost even though it appears nowhere in the spread.
Two accounts quoting the same cents figure can return different sterling, and conversion policy belongs to the platform rather than the metal.
Gold quoted as a stake per point
The spread bet asks something else entirely. Not how many ounces you want, but what a point of movement should be worth to you. You set the stake in pounds, the provider defines the point, and the sterling conversion has happened inside that definition before you deal. Nothing says ounce, and the notional value is derived rather than displayed.
The charge is points added around the provider’s own quote. The record from opening and funding UK accounts has gold at 0.3 points at two of the providers involved, Spreadex and IG, genuinely narrow in the unit it is expressed in. What that unit is worth in metal is a separate question, and the answer belongs to the provider.
Gold quoted with a delivery month attached
The third format prices a dated contract rather than the metal in front of you. A March price and a September price differ for the same bar, because storing, insuring and financing it until September costs more. That gap is nobody’s fee. It is the market’s price of time, sitting inside the quote before a platform adds anything.
Dealing that way changes two further fields. Size arrives in contracts or fractions of one, and the value of the smallest price movement is fixed by the contract specification rather than by your stake. The position also expires, so leaving it alone is a decision with a date attached. Neither property has a spot equivalent.
| The gold quote in front of you | What the price is denominated in | What you set when you deal | What you must supply yourself before comparing it |
| Spot contract for difference | Dollars per troy ounce, dealing charge in cents | A number of ounces | The sterling rate applied when the position closes |
| Spread bet | Points on the provider’s own quote, staked in pounds | Pounds per point | How much metal one point represents at that provider |
| Contract referenced to a delivery month | A price for a dated month, above or below spot | Contracts, and sometimes a fraction of one | How much of the gap to spot is time rather than view |
Three ways the same metal reaches a UK retail account, and what each quote leaves for the reader to supply.
The format arrives with the account rather than being chosen
Notice what nobody in this story ever decided. A reader does not sit down and pick a quoting convention. They pick a firm, for reasons that had nothing to do with metal, and the convention comes attached to whatever that firm offers. Whether all three are available under one login has a different answer at every provider, and it lives in product terms rather than on any comparison page.
So the practical consequence has nothing to do with preference. Comparing the three formats honestly means holding, funding and dealing in three accounts, since a quote you cannot deal on describes what a firm advertises rather than what it charges. Almost nobody does that, which is why the format question tends to be settled years before anybody thinks to ask it.
Nobody publishes the rate between a point and a cent
This is where the comparison collapses. Setting 0.3 points against a spread in cents an ounce needs three conversions: the price movement the provider counts as one point, the metal your pound of stake controls, and the sterling rate at that moment. The first is buried in product details, the second is derived, the third moves while you look. A points figure below a cents figure is not a tighter market, it is a different unit.
Be as hard on where that 0.3 came from. It was noted while accounts were opened and funded to time deposits and withdrawals, and the record carries no date beside it, so presenting it as today’s quote would be invention. Two providers landing together shows they were level on some unstated day and ranks neither.
Open the account, fund it, write down what was charged: that is how platforms for trading gold in the UK get compared by a research site that opens and funds live accounts with its own money rather than compiling rankings from providers’ published fee schedules. The limit sits inside the method: accounts open one wrapper at a time, so a funded record compares providers far more readily than formats.
One cost of carry, three places it surfaces
Gold pays nothing for being owned and costs something to hold, and each format collects that somewhere. The spot contract for difference charges it nightly, on the full exposure, for as long as the position survives. It is itemised, it repeats, and you can watch it accumulate on a statement.
The spread bet either mirrors that nightly or, on a forward-dated bet, folds the whole expected cost into a wider quote accepted once at the outset. The dated contract does something closer to the second, since the distance between your month and spot already contains it. One economic cost, three hiding places. Compare them at the moment of dealing and you have priced one.
Three ancestors rather than three designs
None of this was designed. The stake per point descends from a betting convention and survives partly because HMRC leaves a retail spread bettor’s winnings outside capital gains tax, income tax and stamp duty.
The ounce-priced contract comes from dealer books and global platforms whose whole inventory is quoted against the dollar. The dated contract inherits a specification written for institutions who could take metal.
Three lineages meeting in one app is why the units refuse to reconcile. Nobody was ever obliged to make a quote legible against the other two, and no rule requires it now. These are less three versions of one product than three industries that ended up selling the same metal to the same person on the same phone.
Three questions, and two of them are rarely volunteered
Everything above reduces to a short list you can put to a desk in writing before you fund anything. What movement in the metal counts as one point. What your smallest permitted dealing size comes to in ounces. And how sterling conversion is applied when a dollar-priced position closes.
All three have exact answers, and only the first tends to arrive without being asked twice.
If a desk cannot say how much metal a pound a point buys, the quote compares to nothing and no amount of tabulating will fix it. Across the three formats the only field that genuinely matches is the metal itself, and nobody has ever chosen a provider on the grounds that its gold was made of gold.