New Gold Rush in Trading and Storage After Record Price Spike

London gold trades 9x Shanghai as HK, Singapore push to expand...

GOLD's all-time record price spike of New Year 2026 is now being followed by a rush to launch new vaults, bullion-market clearing and 24/7 trading, led in Asia by regional hubs Hong Kong and Singapore.

While that's widely reported as a "challenge" to London's gold trading dominance in the way that Shanghai's new markets were a decade ago, the UK capital has seen 9 times the volume of gold trade so far in 2026 as has mainland China's domestic hub.

This year's new record-high prices, set amid frantic trading in gold and also silver in late-January, today stand 29% and 73% above current levels for the two major precious metals respectively.

Trading volumes in gold bullion, ETFs and derivatives have since retreated worldwide from January and February's spike. But the average daily value traded so far in 2026 remains markedly ahead of 2025's then-record levels.

Last week, the authorities in Hong Kong announced plans to introduce a tax concession of 50% for some commodity traders, expanding plans to improve the city's secure logistics and storage infrastructure and also confirming plans to launch a Hong Kong clearing system for wholesale gold bullion trading.

US derivatives exchange the CME Group said last Thursday that it will launch 24/7 trading for its 1-ounce gold futures contract at the end of July, pending regulatory approval.

On Monday, the authorities in Singapore detailed plans to launch an over-the-counter (OTC) gold clearing service by the end of 2026.

The same day, and also at this week's Asia Pacific Precious Metals Conference in Singapore, Ruth Crowell − CEO of the London Bullion Market Association − said the world's No.1 gold trading and storage hub may shift its morning auction earlier from 10:30am, the better to accommodate participants in Asia.

Tuesday then saw UK-listed bank Standard Chartered tell China's Caixin newspaper that it is assessing whether to build and run a bullion vault in Hong Kong, the first such step into physical market infrastructure for the London market-making member.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers is meantime pushing a bill called 'The SILVER Act' to force the CME to approve bullion warehouses across the United States to hold metal eligible or registered for meeting delivery against its Comex gold and silver contracts, rather than the current concentration around New York.

Singapore's government-led clearing proposal was signed in public on Monday by representatives from regional banks DBS, OCBC, UOB and Chinese-owned ICBC Standard Bank, plus US banking giant and global bullion leader J.P.Morgan as well as Germany's Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche quit precious metals trading in 2015 during gold's post-financial crisis bear market, just 15 months after opening a new London bullion vault.

The bank then announced its return to precious metals trading in late-2022 as gold re-touched its all-time Covid pandemic price peak. DB became a market-making member of the London bullion market in March this year, two months after gold set its current all-time high close to $5600 per troy ounce.

Widely seen as a race against Hong Kong to launch and win dominance in Asian gold clearing outside mainland China, Singapore's plan is to become "a trusted hub within the global gold ecosystem, linking regional demand with global liquidity and supporting market activity during Asian trading hours," says Gan Kim Yong, the city-state's Deputy Prime Minister and also Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Independent trading exchange Abaxx has seen growing volumes in its physically-deliverable Singapore Gold Kilobar Futures contract, launched last June. But previous attempts to launch centrally cleared gold trading in Singapore failed to take root, with a 100 troy ounce contract cleared on the Singapore Gold Clearing House abandoned in the early 1980s and US-headquartered exchange ICE closing its 1-kilo Singapore futures in 2019, four years after launch.

Alongside wanting to launch 24/7 trading in its lowest-volume gold product, the CME exchange in New York also wants to launch non-stop trading in crude oil futures. But that may struggle to win regulatory approval from US trading commission the CFTC, according to a Bloomberg report citing worries that the move could worsen market volatility during periods of geopolitical turmoil such as the US-Israel war on Iran starting on the last Saturday in February.