FRESHNESS CHECK — gold-prices

• Repo: gold-prices
• Checked on: 2026-03-03

1. Repository Structure

Files found:

2. Dataset Description

Gold Prices — Monthly and annual gold prices in USD since 1833.

Data is sourced from two upstream origins:

1. Timothy Green's Historical Gold Price Table (PDF) — covers 1833–1959. Hosted at https://nma.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/historic_gold_prices_1833_pres.pdf
2. World Bank Commodity Markets ("Pink Sheet") — covers 1960 to present. Main page: https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/commodity-markets

The scripts/process.py script:

• Scrapes the World Bank commodity markets page with BeautifulSoup to find the current XLS download links for monthly and annual prices
• Downloads CMO-Historical-Data-Monthly.xlsx and CMO-Historical-Data-Annual.xlsx
• Downloads the historical PDF from NMA
• Merges PDF data (pre-1960) with the World Bank data (1960+) into data/monthly.csv and data/annual.csv

3. Local Data — Latest Dates

Scanned data/monthly.csv (2,312 rows) and data/annual.csv (192 rows).

The monthly CSV is the higher-resolution dataset. Its latest entry is 2025-07 (July 2025).

4. Upstream Source Probing

Step 4a — World Bank Commodity Markets Page

• URL probed: https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/commodity-markets
• HTTP status: 200 OK
• Result: Page loaded successfully. Parsed all <a> tags with BeautifulSoup.

Found active download links:

• Monthly prices XLSX: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/74e8be41ceb20fa0da750cda2f6b9e4e-0050012026/related/CMO-Historical-Data-Monthly.xlsx
• Annual prices XLSX: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/74e8be41ceb20fa0da750cda2f6b9e4e-0050012026/related/CMO-Historical-Data-Annual.xlsx
• Pink Sheet PDF: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/74e8be41ceb20fa0da750cda2f6b9e4e-0050012026/related/CMO-Pink-Sheet-February-2026.pdf

The document ID 74e8be41ceb20fa0da750cda2f6b9e4e-0050012026 and the Pink Sheet PDF filename both indicate the February 2026 release.

Step 4b — Direct HEAD request on Monthly XLSX

• URL: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/74e8be41ceb20fa0da750cda2f6b9e4e-0050012026/related/CMO-Historical-Data-Monthly.xlsx
• HTTP status from HEAD: 404 (CloudFront CDN quirk — the file requires a standard GET with a User-Agent)
• HTTP status from GET with User-Agent: 200 OK — downloaded successfully (779 KB .xlsx file)

Step 4c — Parsing the Monthly XLSX

Downloaded and opened the XLSX with openpyxl. Sheet structure:

• AFOSHEET (metadata)
• Monthly Prices ← gold price data here
• Monthly Indices
• Description
• Index Weights

Key metadata from Monthly Prices sheet:

• Row 3: "Updated on February 03, 2026"
• Row 4: Column headers; Gold is at column index 69

Scanned all data rows (format YYYYMNN). Last 10 rows with Gold prices:

Latest upstream date with gold data: January 2026 (2026-01)

5. Comparison

The local monthly dataset is 6 months behind the upstream World Bank data.

Missing months in local data: 2025-08, 2025-09, 2025-10, 2025-11, 2025-12, 2026-01

6. Verdict

The dataset IS STALE.

• Latest local date: 2025-07
• Latest upstream date: 2026-01
• Staleness: 6 months behind (missing 6 monthly data points)
• The World Bank Pink Sheet was last updated on February 3, 2026 and contains gold price data through January 2026.
• Running python scripts/process.py would refresh the data to the current upstream state.