BullionVault course · reference
Reference card
The vocabulary the interview will assume you already have. Print this.
Terms marked BV are BullionVault's own published mechanics, and are the ones worth being exact about. The rest are general market vocabulary.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Troy ounce | The unit precious metals are quoted in. Exactly 31.1034768 grams — a definition, not a measurement. Distinct from the avoirdupois ounce (28.349523125 g) used for everything else. |
| Kilogram BV | The unit the order board deals and settles in. Orders are placed in kilograms; bullion balances are quoted in kilograms. 1 kg = 1000 / 31.1034768 = 32.150746… troy oz — a non-terminating decimal, which is why the conversion needs an explicit rounding rule. |
| Gram BV | The smallest dealable increment. Clients can trade in increments as small as one gram and no smaller — so a valid quantity is always a whole number of grams. |
| The four metals BV | Gold, silver, platinum, palladium. Commission and custody rates are calculated separately for each; volumes are never pooled across metals. |
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Bid | The price you are offered when you want to sell. The buyer's side of the board. |
| Offer (or ask) | The price you are offered when you want to buy. The seller's side. |
| Spread | Offer minus bid. Always positive on a functioning board: buyers want a bargain, sellers want top price. The round-trip cost of dealing, before commission. |
| Spot price | The wholesale market price for immediate delivery, quoted per troy ounce by counterparties. Must be converted to per-kilogram before the board can execute on it. |
| Execution price | The per-kilogram price a deal actually happens at. In this course it carries 6 decimal places — more than the currency's minor unit, so that rounding happens once, at the end. |
| Limit price BV | The worst price you will accept on an order. Crucially, you may deal better than your limit: “you will deal at a better price than your limit price if someone is still quoting a price which is better than your limit when your order is received.” |
| Price improvement | The difference between your limit and the better price you actually got. A matching engine that always fills at the incoming order's limit is wrong — and it is a favourite interview trap. |
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Order board BV | The marketplace where clients deal directly with each other — buying another client's bullion, or selling to them, at a price you choose. Not a dealer quoting you a price: a genuine two-sided book. |
| Resting order BV | An order sitting on the board waiting for a counterparty. What is left of a partly-filled order is “posted as an active limit on the order boards.” |
| Partial match BV | Some of the order executes now, the remainder rests. Only the unexecuted part of a partially matched order can be cancelled — the filled part is a done deal. |
| Price–time priority | The standard matching rule: best price wins; among equal prices, the order that arrived first wins. Makes matching deterministic — and makes the ordering of concurrent arrivals a correctness concern, not a detail. |
| Consideration | The cash value of a deal: execution price × quantity, rounded to whole minor units. The figure that hits the client's cash balance. |
| Fill | One execution against one counterparty. A single order may produce several fills at several prices. |
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Commission BV | Charged on each deal, banded on the client's trailing twelve-month volume in that metal: 0.50% below 75,000; 0.10% from 75,000 to 825,000; 0.05% above. Resets on the account anniversary. |
| “Whole pennies or cents” BV | The tariff's phrase for commission rounding. It fixes the scale but not the direction — an ambiguity you should name out loud rather than resolve silently. |
| Mark-up / mark-down BV | The tariff's terminology for silver, platinum and palladium, where the equivalent charge is expressed as an adjustment to price rather than as commission. |
| Custody BV | Monthly storage-and-insurance charge, per metal held: gold 0.12%/yr (min $4/month); silver, platinum, palladium 0.48%/yr (min $8/month). The monthly minimum is what makes this interesting to model — a percentage with a floor is not a percentage. |
| Vault BV | The physical location bullion is held in. Clients choose one, and a holding in one vault is not fungible with a holding in another — so the vault is part of the instrument's identity, not metadata. |
ounces, ask which ounce. A 9% error is hiding in that name.BigDecimal weight tells you nothing; Quantity holding whole grams cannot be misread.