Gold’s modern trading history does not begin with a market. It begins with a prohibition. On April 5, 1933, Executive Order 6102 compelled Americans to surrender their gold coin, bullion and certificates to the Federal Reserve at $20.67 an ounce. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 followed, revaluing gold to $35 and formally barring most private ownership. The logic was blunt: a government managing a currency system could not tolerate a competing store of value that citizens might hoard instead of spending or investing in dollar assets.

That insecurity was never uniquely American. Bretton Woods (1944) pegged the dollar to gold at $35 and pegged other currencies to the dollar, but private ownership stayed tightly restricted across much of Europe and Asia well into the 1970s. Central banks, not citizens, were meant to be gold’s custodians — and when speculative pressure threatened the $35 peg in the 1960s, the U.S. and European central banks formed the London Gold Pool (1961–1968) to jointly suppress the market price. The Pool collapsed in 1968. It was an early proof that an administered gold price could not survive contact with real capital flows.

The whole system broke on August 15, 1971, when President Nixon suspended dollar-gold convertibility — ending Bretton Woods and letting gold float freely for the first time in nearly forty years. Freedom to trade arrived before freedom to own: COMEX launched a standardized, centrally cleared gold futures contract on December 31, 1974 — the same day U.S. citizens regained the legal right to own gold bullion outright. For the first time since 1933, an ordinary American could take a position on gold’s price rather than simply holding coins in secret.

Silver’s Parallel, Rockier Path

Silver’s derivatives markets matured through a genuine cautionary tale. In 1979–1980 the Hunt brothers attempted to corner the silver market, driving prices from roughly $6 to nearly $50 an ounce before emergency margin hikes — “Silver Thursday” — crashed the price by half in a single session. The episode did lasting damage to trust in silver markets, but it also forced exchanges to build the position-limit and margining infrastructure that today’s much larger, much faster continuous markets still depend on.

Democratization: ETFs Did What Futures Never Could

Futures access stayed institutional for thirty years. The real democratization came through a security that traded like a stock: the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD), launched in November 2004, let any equity brokerage account buy fractional, dollar-denominated gold exposure with a single click — no vault, no delivery, no futures margin call. Silver followed the same path with the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) in 2006. Central banks, meanwhile, flipped from net sellers to the largest structural buyers in the market, a shift that has directly shaped the 2024–2026 price cycle.

FX and CFDs Stretched the Clock — But Not All the Way

If ETFs democratized access, foreign exchange and CFD trading democratized time. Spot gold (XAU/USD) and spot silver (XAG/USD) were adopted by retail FX brokers from the 1990s onward and traded, functionally, as currency pairs — riding the FX market’s own near-continuous Monday-to-Friday session. That gave gold and silver roughly 120 hours of tradeable time a week, up from the exchange-only hours of the 1970s. But the weekend — the roughly 48 hours between the Friday New York close and the Sunday evening Asia-Pacific open — stayed dark, even as news, elections, wars and central-bank surprises kept happening in real time. Closing that specific gap is what 2026 finally did.

The current wave did not arrive from one direction. It converged from crypto-native exchanges, the incumbent futures giant, and the retail CFD industry more or less simultaneously — each applying the same logic that FX and CFD brokers applied thirty years earlier, just filling in the one window that was still closed.

Who Launched What, and How the Market Received It

How Big Is the Underlying Market? (2025–2026 estimates)

Bars scaled to global FX turnover for visual comparison. Sources: World Gold Council Gold Market Primer (2025–26), LBMA trade data, BIS FX turnover benchmark, industry oil-volume estimates.

Every major asset class reads one slice of the world. Gold and silver are unusual in reading several at once — which is precisely the property that made governments nervous enough to ban them and is now the property making them the default 24/7 instrument.