The primary US futures exchange for gold, silver, copper, and other metals — a division of CME Group where standardized metals contracts are traded and, in principle, can result in physical delivery.
The Commodity Exchange, Inc. (COMEX) was founded in New York in 1933 and is now a division of CME Group. It is the global benchmark pricing venue for gold and silver, with the most liquid metals futures contracts in the world. COMEX gold (GC) and silver (SI) futures prices are what financial media quote as "the gold price" and "the silver price," and they serve as the basis for pricing across the global metals market.
COMEX contracts are standardized: gold futures represent 100 troy ounces per contract, silver futures represent 5,000 troy ounces. Each contract specifies delivery months, quality standards, and approved delivery locations in New York area warehouses. In principle, any contract held through expiration can result in physical delivery — the seller delivers approved bars to an approved vault and the buyer takes title. In practice, the vast majority (typically over 99%) of contracts are settled in cash or rolled to the next month, as most participants are financial speculators or hedgers with no interest in physical delivery.
The gap between COMEX's enormous daily trading volume in paper contracts and the physical metal actually available for delivery in COMEX-registered vaults is a subject of ongoing debate among precious metals analysts. Critics argue that this paper-to-physical ratio — at times estimated in the hundreds-to-one range for silver — means the price established on COMEX may not accurately reflect genuine physical supply and demand. Monitoring COMEX registered vault inventories and the ratio of open interest to deliverable supply is one way investors track potential stress in the physical market.
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