MyAurum Journal

Precious metals intelligence,
sourced and cited

Current reporting on gold, silver, and platinum — buying, selling, scams, and market conditions across India, the US, UAE, and beyond.

🌐 Global Essay 9 June 2026

Rock-hard body blow: what brokenness clears

Brokenness does not fuel reinvention. It permits it. The selves you were maintaining out of inertia required energy you did not know you were spending. When the upholding stops, what arrives is not power. It is a window — and an old Snap! track from 1992 names the only instruction the window allows you to follow.

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🌐 Global Essay 9 June 2026

Accidental theology: why Def Leppard's 'Women' does more with Genesis than contemporary Christian rock

A 1987 hair-metal album opener does more narrative work with the Genesis creation account than the bulk of contemporary Christian rock — not because Def Leppard understood scripture better, but because the formal architecture of each genre pulls in opposite directions. The accidental theology of one is structural. So, in its own way, is the absence of it in the other.

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🌐 Global Essay 9 June 2026

I heard you calling: the fate of Ophelia and the atypical Swift listener

There is a kind of Taylor Swift listener who is not a Taylor Swift listener — the critics, the older ears, the men who skip her catalogue as a category mistake, the classicist-pop ear. 'The Fate of Ophelia' is the song that, audibly, opens the door to them. The question worth asking is what specifically about its construction lets them in.

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🌐 Global Markets 8 June 2026

The 'I-We' Index: the psychological sibling the Deadlift Index has been missing

The Truflation Deadlift Index tracks CEO physical capability as a proxy for executive resilience. The cleanest candidate to sit alongside it is psychological rather than physical: a tradeable index built on the ratio of "I" to "we" in CEO speech — a signal forty years of academic research suggests is one of the most reliable predictors of leadership character in existence. This piece proposes the index, makes the academic case, and sketches the first cohort of twenty.

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🌐 Global Buying guide 5 June 2026

Buying gold in London: a guide for diaspora Indians

London is a more interesting market for Indian gold buyers than its reputation suggests — and an under-used one. The hallmark certainty, the VAT-exempt route for investment-grade buying, the split between cultural and bullion clusters, and the changed cross-border math after the May 2026 Indian import duty hike all create opportunities that the standard "wait until India" instinct misses.

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🇮🇳 India Markets 4 June 2026

On duty: India's two-sided gold strategy, and the word doing all its work

The Hyderabad speech, the duty hike from 6% to 15%, and the parallel GMS revamp discussions arrived close enough together to be read as one strategy: suppress new household gold demand on one side, mobilise the existing household stockpile on the other. The whole posture rests on a single word — idle — that misdescribes what private gold is actually doing.

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🌐 Global Essay 3 June 2026

The destructive cadence: when self-analysis stops closing the case

Self-analysis has a destructive mode, and the destructive mode is not depth. It is cadence. What happens when the tool stops being something you pick up, use and put down, and becomes a posture you live inside — a continuous low hum of examination that opens cases faster than it closes them.

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🌐 Global Essay 31 May 2026

Too messy and too clean: why 'Messy' transcends the gender divide

'Messy' arrived sounding like a tantrum and ended up sounding like a diagnosis. The double-bind it articulates — being held to instructions that contradict themselves — used to be primarily women's. It has become the operating condition of modern intimate life for everyone.

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🌐 Global Essay 29 May 2026

Your balance sheet as a self-portrait: the confession you didn't mean to write

A balance sheet looks like accounting. It is autobiography. The categories you invented, the entries you overweighted, the omissions you've defended for years — read in the right light, they are a confession you wrote without realising you were confessing. And almost all of it is editable, once you can see it.

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🌐 Global Markets 27 May 2026

Five forms of gold, five kinds of trust: a framework for the mix

There is no universal ideal split across jewellery, bullion, SGBs, ETFs and tokenised gold. Each form does a different job and fails in a different way. The useful question isn't "what proportion" — it's "whom am I trusting, and what am I holding gold against."

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🌐 Global Essay 26 May 2026

The single point of failure: why succession is the transfer of knowledge, not wealth

We imagine succession as deciding who gets what. But the thing that actually breaks at the end is rarely the wealth — it's the map. In most families, one person carries the whole inventory in their head, and when they go, the knowledge goes with them. The heirs don't inherit assets. They inherit a mystery.

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🌐 Global Essay 25 May 2026

When despair stops feeling like despair: how it quietly rewrites your outlook and the people around you

The dangerous kind of despair does not spill out in tantrums over small things. It sinks in, becomes the lens you see through, and disguises itself as wisdom, silently reshaping every decision, your whole outlook, and your ability to reach other people.

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🌐 Global Essay 22 May 2026

The forecast you mistook for a fact: on reframing the present to reach a different future

Reframing your situation does not change it. The rent is still due, the facts still stand. So why does it change anything at all? Because you never act on reality directly — you act on your reading of it, and action is the only thing that touches the future.

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🌐 Global Markets 21 May 2026

Can retail ride the silver wave? A note on who actually surfs and who gets surfed

Silver's swings look like an invitation. The wave metaphor flatters everyone into imagining themselves the surfer. It's worth asking, calmly, who is actually positioned to ride volatility — and who the volatility is riding.

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🌐 Global Essay 20 May 2026

What boredom was for: on the empty space where agency used to begin

Boredom was, until recently, a universal human experience. It is now nearly extinct — every empty moment is fillable from a device in your pocket. We treat this as a convenience. But the empty space boredom occupied was doing something: it was where people decided, for themselves, what to do. A piece on boredom, distraction, and the capacity to choose — and on what tolerating the void has to do with handling money.

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🌐 Global Essay 20 May 2026

The legible life: on striving for what can be measured

Modern life has built more instruments for measuring whether you are winning, and more channels for comparing your winning to everyone else's, than any previous era. Striving flows toward what can be measured — and the measurable turns out to be a poor guide to what is worth striving for. A piece on misguided striving, money as its purest case, and the choice that remains inside the machinery.

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🌐 Global Essay 18 May 2026

On midlife, money, and what one was supposed to be for the other

The midlife crisis is partly a cliché and partly a real cultural phenomenon. For men, it almost always involves money — not just spending it but reading it, watching the number on the screen, asking it questions it was never designed to answer. A look at why men see themselves in their bank balance, and what the balance starts revealing when it can no longer be read for what its owner once needed it to mean.

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🌐 Global Essay 16 May 2026

The patterns you can't see: notes on watching yourself invest

Most investors fail not because they lack market knowledge but because they keep repeating the same handful of decisions in slightly different costumes. The patterns are visible to outside observers. They are mostly invisible to the person making them. A meditation on pattern recognition turned inward, and on what the records have to look like for it to be possible.

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🌐 Global Essay 16 May 2026

Holding silver: notes on the gap between what the metal means and how it moves

Silver is sold as a store of value and trades like a leveraged tech stock. Copper carries the cultural weight of industrial gravity and moves on Chinese property data. Retail investors who buy either for "stability" usually discover what they actually bought from the inside of a 25% drawdown. A meditation on holding volatile metals — and on the discipline that separates the investors who survive them from the rest.

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🌐 Global Essay 16 May 2026

The conversation most families avoid

Across most cultures and most generations, families have agreed implicitly to not talk about certain things: money, illness, mortality, who gets what. The silence has reasons. It also has costs that are borne, almost always, by the people who weren't part of the original agreement.

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🌐 Global Essay 16 May 2026

The return: why second-generation immigrants leave the countries their parents fought to enter

A quiet phenomenon visible across the Indian, Chinese, and Korean diasporas. The grandchildren of villagers who emigrated to Britain, Canada, the US, and the Gulf are returning to their home countries in numbers the original migration story did not predict. A look at why — and what it reveals about wealth, identity, and where families end up holding what they own.

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🌐 Global Investment Education 15 May 2026

Nvidia vs silver: how to think about two very different AI trades

Both have ridden the AI wave to record highs — Nvidia delivered 66% revenue growth in its latest fiscal year, silver rallied 130% in 2025. Retail investors increasingly ask which is the better AI bet. The honest answer: they're not in the same category, and the comparison matters mostly for what it reveals about each.

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🇮🇳 India Investment Education 15 May 2026

Should you invest in PAXG?

PAXG is a blockchain-based token where each unit represents one ounce of LBMA-certified gold stored in London vaults. Globally, it's a credible gold investment vehicle. For Indian investors, the 30% Virtual Digital Asset tax classification, 1% TDS, and access friction combine to make it dramatically worse than the alternatives available domestically. An honest guide.

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🇮🇳 India Investment Education 15 May 2026

Should retail investors buy gold and silver futures?

The honest answer for most retail investors: probably not. Gold and silver futures offer leveraged exposure to volatile assets, with tax treatment that's worse than ETFs, rollover costs that erode long-term holdings, and a SEBI-documented track record where 91% of retail F&O traders lose money. A guide to what futures actually are, the narrow cases where they make sense, and what works better for everyone else.

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🇮🇳 India Market Analysis 14 May 2026

After Modi's gold appeal: three scenarios for Indian gold prices over the next year

PM Modi asked Indians to pause non-essential gold buying for a year. The government raised import duty from 6% to 15% within 48 hours. Jewellery stocks fell 8-10%. A guide to the most likely scenarios for Indian gold prices over the next twelve months, what the appeal can and cannot actually do, and how different categories of buyer should think about it.

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🇮🇳 India Market Analysis 12 May 2026

Silver in 2026: why prices keep seesawing, and what to expect for the rest of the year

Silver rose 130%+ in 2025, breached $100 per ounce, and pulled Indian prices to a record Rs 4 lakh per kg — then started swinging violently in both directions. A guide to what's actually driving the volatility, the structural tensions underneath the chart, and the three scenarios analysts are watching for the rest of 2026.

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🇮🇳 India Investment Education 11 May 2026

The year commodity ETFs beat equity in India: inside the gold and silver surge

Indian retail investors poured ₹1.81 lakh crore into ETFs in FY26 — the highest ever. For the first time in Indian financial history, gold and silver ETFs combined attracted more money than equity ETFs. A look at what's driving the surge, where the silver story is louder than the gold story, and the documentation problem Indian families haven't yet solved.

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🇮🇳 India Personal Finance 8 May 2026

Gold loans in India 2026: pros, cons, and the new RBI rules every borrower should know

Gold loans are India's largest collateralised credit market. The RBI rewrote the rules in April 2026 — tiered LTVs, capped bullet tenures, stricter auction protections. A 2026 guide to when gold loans actually make sense, when they don't, and what every borrower should verify before signing.

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🗽 New York Buying Guide 6 May 2026

Buying gold from diaspora jewellers in New York: what every Indian-American shopper should check

Jackson Heights' 74th Street and Edison's Oak Tree Road host the largest concentrations of Indian-American gold jewellers on the East Coast. Both attract sales tax, neither comes with BIS hallmarks, and the right shopping decision often depends on which state line you're willing to cross. A practical guide.

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🇮🇳 India Investment Education 5 May 2026

The Indian gold buyer is changing: how Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z hold the metal differently

Indian gold buyers under 35 are not abandoning gold — they prefer it more strongly than their parents did. But they hold it differently: digitally, in smaller amounts, on their own initiative, and with documentation their grandmothers never imagined. A look at the generational shift, what it reveals about Indian family wealth, and where the friction sits.

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🌐 Global : Investment Education 4 May 2026

Gold as a quick-returns investment: why the math doesn't work

Gold rallied 50% in 2025 and retail investors are piling in for the next leg. The math on quick-returns gold investing is unforgiving: transaction costs, tax penalties, drawdown risk, and a fundamental mismatch between what gold is and how it is being traded. A guide to why gold is a strong long-term asset and a poor short-term trade.

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🌐 Global Quality checks 2 May 2026

How to check if gold is real at home: a complete guide

Whether you've just bought a piece, inherited an old set, or pulled something out of a long-forgotten box, the question is the same: is it real, and how pure is it? A practical guide to verifying gold at home — which tests work, which don't, and when to escalate to a professional.

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🇮🇳 India Buying Guide 2 May 2026

How much gold can you carry to India in 2026: customs rules for travellers and NRIs

India's customs rules for gold were rewritten in February 2026. The new Baggage Rules moved gold jewellery from a value-based to a weight-based duty-free allowance, raised the general personal-effects limit, and clarified eligibility for NRIs, OCIs, and returning residents. A 2026 guide.

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🇮🇳 India Buying Guide 1 May 2026

Buying gold in Zaveri Bazaar: a complete guide to Mumbai's 165-year-old market

Zaveri Bazaar is the source of roughly 65% of India's gold trading, home to over 7,000 jewellers, and 165 years old. It is also where Mumbaikars and visitors typically save 5-15% on jewellery compared to branded chains — if they know how to navigate it. A first-time buyer's guide to the bazaar, the BIS hallmark check, the IBJA rate, and what to verify before you pay.

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🌐 Global Estate Planning 1 May 2026

Succession planning for jewellery and precious metals: a guide for families

Jewellery and precious metals are among the hardest assets to pass down well. They are often undocumented, hard to value, easily lost, and easily disputed between heirs. This guide walks through every step a family should take — inventory, valuation, storage, communication, legal vehicle — to make the transition clean.

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🌐 Global Buying Guide 27 April 2026

Buying gold in Texas: what Indian-American families need to know in 2026

Texas exempts bullion from sales tax — but not jewellery, which is what most Indian-American families actually buy. India just rewrote its customs rules for travellers carrying gold. Two regimes, two assumptions worth questioning before you pay.

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🇮🇳 India Estate Planning 27 April 2026

Inheriting gold in Goa: why the rules are different from the rest of India

Goa is the only Indian state where a 158-year-old Portuguese statute still decides what happens to your family's gold. Communion of assets means half is already legally your spouse's. Forced heirship locks half of any estate to your children. Most Goan families don't plan for either.

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🇮🇳 India Buying Guide 25 April 2026

Buying gold bars and coins for investment in India: what to watch out for

Branded coins from jewellers can lose 5–10% of value the moment you walk out of the store. Buy-back terms vary wildly. Hallmarking rules for coins are different from jewellery. Here's a 2026 buyer's guide that most retailers won't volunteer.

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🇮🇳 India Market Trends 24 April 2026

India's branded jewellery boom: revenue growing, grams shrinking

Tanishq up 40%. Kalyan up 42%. Organised share climbing past 35%. The numbers look like a rout of the family jeweller — until you back out the gold-price effect.

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🇮🇳 India Market Trends 24 April 2026

Akshaya Tritiya 2026: rupees up, grams down

Headlines are calling it a record Rs 20,000 crore festival. But India bought less gold this year, not more — and the volume numbers tell a story the price figures hide.

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🌐 Global gold appreciation 17 April 2026

What your gold is worth now

Central banks increased their gold reserves steadily from 2022 to 2025, diversifying away from the US dollar — and gold overtook US Treasuries as the largest share of global reserves for the first time in thirty years.

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🌐 Global Silver scaling new highs 14 April 2026

Silver's moment: what Indian families holding silver should know in 2026

Silver is on the global catwalks and hitting record prices. If your family holds silver jewellery, utensils, or coins, here is why 2026 is a good time to know exactly what it is worth.

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🌐 Global Planning to sell gold jewellery in Dublin 14 April 2026

Selling gold jewellery in Dublin: what to know before you walk in

Planning to sell gold jewellery in Dublin? Here's how auction houses, cash-for-gold buyers, and bullion dealers compare — and how to make sure you don't leave money on the table.

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🌐 Global Buying gold or silver jewellery in Ireland 14 April 2026

Dublin gold hallmarks explained: what every buyer should know

Buying gold or silver jewellery in Ireland? Learn what the Hibernia mark, harp, and fineness numbers on Dublin hallmarks actually mean — and how to protect yourself before you pay.

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🇮🇳 India Scams & Consumer Rights 8 April 2026

Fake hallmarks, swapped jewellery, inflated making charges: the gold scams Indians face in 2026

Gold hit ₹1.52 lakh per 10g in early April 2026 — and scammers have noticed. From Chamoli to Rajasthan, fake BIS hallmarks are turning up on copper-alloy pieces sold as 22-karat gold. Here's what's happening, what the law says, and how to protect yourself.

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🇦🇪 UAE Buying Guide 8 April 2026

Buying gold in Dubai's Gold Souk: what Indian shoppers need to know in 2026

Dubai Police have issued fresh warnings about fake online gold promotions, and Indian tourists remain the primary target of Gold Souk scams. What's changed, what's stayed the same, and how to shop safely.

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🗽 New York Retail & Diaspora 8 April 2026

Where Indian New Yorkers buy gold — and what to watch for in 2026

buying-indian-gold-jewellery-new-york

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