Certificate · Module 6 of 6

Four free Foundation lessons already cover making charges, the all-in per-gram number, buyback and premiums — and ship a working calculator. If you have read them, you can already normalise an offer.

So this module is not about the arithmetic. The arithmetic is revision. This module is about writing a recommendation somebody else will rely on, and being explicit about what you could not verify — which the free tier cannot teach, because it has nobody to mark it.

The worksheet gives you a number. This module is about what you are willing to put your name to underneath that number.

Anatomy of a retail price

Every retail offer decomposes into five things: spot metal value, fabrication, distribution, dealer margin and tax. Only the first is knowable from outside. The middle three are usually bundled into "making", which is exactly why normalisation matters.

And a word about the two prices on a dealer's board, because it reframes the whole retail relationship. A dealer is not betting on the gold price — a dealer who wanted to bet on the gold price would buy gold and go home. A dealer holds inventory, hedges it, and earns the spread. The spread is the cost of providing liquidity plus a margin. Once you see that, "why is the buy price lower than the sell price" stops being a grievance and becomes a number you can interrogate.

Coins carry more than bars for the same metal because of legal-tender status, minting cost and constrained mint capacity — which is why coin premiums spiked sharply in 2008 and 2020, when capacity rather than metal was the binding constraint.

Tax and duty, as of September 2026

The travellers' allowance changed too, and most published summaries are citing repealed law. The Baggage Rules 2026 (Notification 14/2026-Customs (N.T.), 1 February 2026, in force 2 February) superseded the 2016 Rules. Rule 6, verbatim:

"A resident or tourist of Indian origin residing abroad for more than one year, on return to India shall be allowed duty free clearance of jewellery upto a weight of forty grams, if brought by a female passenger or twenty grams if brought by a passenger other than a female passenger in bona fide baggage."

Three things nearly everyone gets wrong:

1. The residence condition is the whole rule. Without more than one year abroad there is no jewellery allowance at all.
2. There is no separate children's category. The rule splits on sex, not age.
3. The rupee caps are repealed. The 2016 Rules capped the allowance at ₹50,000 and ₹100,000. The 2026 rule states weight only.

The general duty-free allowance is now ₹75,000 for residents and Indian-origin tourists, ₹25,000 for foreign tourists, ₹2,500 for crew — and nothing at all for passengers arriving by land border, a detail almost never mentioned and directly relevant at the Nepal and Bangladesh crossings.

Elsewhere: UK investment gold is VAT-exempt (VAT Act 1994, Sch. 9, Group 15) — bars of at least 995 fineness, and coins minted after 1800 of at least 900 fineness or which have been legal tender, priced at no more than 180% of the open market value of their gold content. Silver and platinum have no equivalent exemption and are standard-rated at 20%. In the United States, physical bullion is a collectible under IRC § 408(m), so long-term gains carry a maximum 28% rate — a cap, not a flat rate, and a taxpayer below that marginal rate pays their lower ordinary rate.

The mis-selling record

On 20 March 2024 the CFTC, FINRA and NASAA issued a joint alert on precious metals fraud targeting retirees. Over the preceding decade the CFTC brought cases involving "over $500 million of overpriced metals", sold through "high-pressure and often deceitful telemarketing techniques" exploiting retirement-plan rollovers, generally framed as "numismatic" or "semi-numismatic" coins.

Cite that figure correctly. It is cumulative decade-long enforcement, not annual losses — and it is frequently miscited as the latter, including by people warning against mis-selling, which is its own small lesson in source discipline.

The teaching point is not "don't do this". It is that the mis-selling pattern is a pricing structure, and a pricing structure has a shape you can recognise in a brochure before anyone has been harmed.

Making, wastage, and the offer that looks cheapest

Making is charged four ways in common use — a percentage on net metal value, a percentage on gross weight, a flat rate per gram, or a flat charge per piece — often in the same market. And then there is wastage, historically a real manufacturing loss and now commercially an uplift applied to the billed weight, which compounds with the making percentage.

The exercise below runs four offers on identical gold. Work it before reading the conclusion.

Where the real margin sits

World Gold Council Q2 2026 India data shows exchange and old gold reaching up to 70% of sales in some stores. A practitioner who understands the sale but not the exchange understands less than a third of the transaction.

The deduction applied to incoming old gold is quoted less transparently than the making charge, and it is negotiated at the counter after the customer has decided to buy. That sequencing is the point.

Writing a recommendation somebody will rely on

The most transferable thing in the Certificate, and the reason the final assessment is written rather than numerical. Three rules:

1. State what you did. Method, not conclusion.
2. State what you found. With the arithmetic visible.
3. State what you could not verify. Specifically.

The third is what separates a professional opinion from a sales pitch. "I could not confirm the board rate at the moment of quotation" is worth everything. "Prices may vary" is worth nothing — because the first tells the reader which part of your answer to distrust, and the second protects you rather than them.

What this module cannot tell you

It cannot tell you whether a given purchase was a good one. That depends on what the buyer wanted, which is a question you have to ask rather than compute. What it can do is let you say, with the arithmetic on the page, exactly how one offer compares to another and exactly which parts of your comparison rest on something you could not check.

Kept in this browser only — no account, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Educational content only. Not financial, investment or tax advice. Aurix does not buy, sell, store or broker metal, and does not quote executable prices.