When you record a purchase, the Spot Price field on the line auto-fills with the current live spot for that metal, and on submit it gets saved alongside the transaction line forever.
That recorded number doesn't move after the fact. It's the historical anchor for what spot was at the moment you bought, and we never overwrite it.
This article covers what that recorded spot is actually used for, what it explicitly isn't used for, and the practical reasons we built it this way.
The single most useful thing to understand up front: "locked in" applies to the historical record, not to the item's current value. Your Gold Eagle's value on the dashboard always tracks live spot, regardless of what spot was the day you bought it.
For the form-side walkthrough, see How to record a purchase.
What the recorded spot actually drives
Two things, and only two:
The premium recorded for the purchase. premium = pricePerUnit − (weightOz × spotAtPurchase). The recorded spot is what we subtract from the per-unit price you paid to figure out the per-unit dealer markup — the dollar amount you paid over spot. That premium figure is stored on the transaction line and surfaced everywhere the app shows premium-related data.
Cost basis. When the app needs to compute cost basis for an inventory item — for the Annual Report, for a sale, for any "what did I pay for this" question — it uses weight × spotAtPurchase + premium. Both halves of that formula need to be stable historical numbers for the math to mean anything year over year.
That's it. Recorded spot is a cost-basis input. Nothing else depends on it.
What the recorded spot does NOT drive
This is the part some users initially get wrong, so it's worth being direct:
The item's current value. Every "what's this coin worth today" figure on every page — Dashboard, Holdings, Analytics, the Top Holdings cards — is computed as weight × current spot, recalculated continuously as live spot ticks. Your recorded historical spot never enters this calculation.
Portfolio total value. Same reason — the portfolio total is the sum of every held item's current value, all driven by live current spot.
Any gain figure relative to today's market. Unrealized gain on the dashboard is current value − cost basis. Current value uses current spot; cost basis uses recorded spot. The two never swap.
A useful framing: think of recorded spot as the price tag on a museum exhibit — historical, fixed, telling you what the piece was worth at the moment it entered the collection. The "current market value" placard next to it changes every day. Both pieces of information are useful for different things; neither one overwrites the other.
Why we lock it in
Two concrete reasons to capture spot at the moment of purchase rather than letting it drift or be recomputed:
Cost basis stays reproducible. If you bought a Gold Eagle in 2019 at $1,400 spot, your cost basis for that coin needs to anchor on $1,400 forever — it's the number any sale, tax filing, or gain calculation has to refer back to. If we didn't store the historical spot, we'd have no way to reconstruct it later, and your cost basis would be unanchored.
Premium-over-spot is the meaningful dealer comparison. What a dealer charged above spot on the day you bought is the apples-to-apples comparison number — it doesn't drift with the market. Storing premium and historical spot separately means we can show you "you paid $110 over spot on this coin" months or years later, and the figure means the same thing it did the day you bought.
Neither of those reasons is about valuation. Current value works fine without any recorded historical spot at all — it only needs current spot and weight. The recorded spot exists for the cost-basis and dealer-comparison work.
A concrete example
Two users both buy a 1 oz American Gold Eagle:
Alex buys one when spot is $1,500. Alex pays $1,610 for the coin — $110 over spot.
Bo buys one this week in May 2026 when spot is $4,700. Bo pays $4,810 for the coin — also $110 over spot.
Both users record their purchase with the spot price from their respective dates. A few days later, with spot still around $4,700, both users open their Holdings page.
Both coins show the same current value: 1 × $4,700 = $4,700. The current value is identical because both coins carry the same weight of gold and spot is what it is today.
Their cost basis is different:
Alex: 1 × $1,500 + $110 = $1,610.
Bo: 1 × $4,700 + $110 = $4,810.
Their unrealized gain is different:
Alex: $4,700 − $1,610 = $3,090 gain.
Bo: $4,700 − $4,810 = −$110 (i.e., still down by the premium paid).
If gold spot rises to $4,800 tomorrow, both coins appear on each user's dashboard as worth $4,800 — the recorded historical spots from 2020 and this week stay exactly where they were. The historical spot anchors cost basis; current spot drives current value. They never interact.
How it works on the form
The mechanical behavior, in plain terms:
Today's purchase: Leave the auto-filled current spot alone. The form pulls the live spot for the line's metal when you select the product, and submitting saves that number to the transaction line.
Historical purchase: Override the auto-filled value with the historical spot for the purchase date. You can find this on your dealer's invoice (most include it on the receipt), or from a public spot chart for the metal. Once you save the transaction, that historical spot is the recorded spot for that purchase — forever.
Always USD per troy ounce. Spot is quoted globally in USD per oz. Even if your display currency is GBP or EUR, this field expects USD.
The auto-fill is a convenience for today's purchases, not a constraint. The form treats whatever number is in the field at submit time as the recorded spot, with no special handling for "current" vs. "manually entered."
Where the recorded spot shows up later
Once a transaction is saved, the recorded spot is preserved in a few places:
The expanded view of the transaction on the History page shows the recorded spot alongside the per-unit price and premium for each line.
CSV exports of transactions include the recorded spot as a column on each line.
Cost-basis figures everywhere they appear — the Annual Report, Holdings rows, Analytics breakdowns — are computed from the recorded spot under the hood.
The Dashboard ticker, the Holdings current-value column, the Top Holdings cards, and every other "what is this worth today" surface use live current spot, not the recorded spot. The two sit side by side throughout the app, doing different jobs.
If you've already recorded a purchase with the wrong spot
Editing a transaction lets you correct a mis-entered historical spot after the fact. Saving the edit recomputes the recorded premium and the cost-basis figures for every inventory item the line created — without disturbing the current value math, which keeps tracking live spot. See [Editing a transaction after the fact].
Where to go next
How to record a purchase: The full Record Purchase form walkthrough.
Entering the premium you paid: The other half of the cost-basis equation.
[Understanding melt value]: How the current value of every held item is computed.
[Editing a transaction after the fact]: Correcting a historical spot or premium after submit.
[Why your portfolio value differs from your cost basis]: The unrealized-gain story, in detail.