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 Although they call it by different names—hedging account, toll account, vault account, pool account, consignment account—most refiners offer a way to hold your metal aside until you want or need it. You lock in your market rate and there it stays, snug as a solid gold bug while the market does what it will. And it’s yours to move as you see fit, whether to buy, sell, or ship to a fabricator. “The ounces, the weight of the metal, stay in the account,” says Failer. “And it’s ounces, not dollars. Say when the job was processed, 15 ounces were recovered. Those 15 ounces of pure [24k] gold go into the vault. If they use 14k on a regular basis, for example, they’ve got almost 20 ounces of 14k available. “So no matter what the market’s doing, whether it goes up or down, they still have those ounces in there,” she adds. “They don’t have to worry about playing the market. It gives them a bit of an edge as far as being able to manufacture.” Like the metal in/metal out concept, using a hedging account can reduce your costs. “Most of our customers are taking their refining, putting it into a consignment account, and taking product back out of it,” says Keith Mason, vice president of refining for Imperial Smelting and Refining in Markham, Ontario, Canada. “Working out of consignment reduces their cost since Imperial’s not financing the metal; therefore, the surcharges are reduced.” Refiners are about providing service, whether it’s helping you cover an alloy mix-up or just sheltering your returned gold from the breezy fluctuations of the gold market until you need it. The work a refiner can do for your operation goes well beyond just melting metal and getting your gold back. If you want to know what they can do for you, all you need to do is ask. |
