BullionTally Blog
Guides and insights for precious metals stackers — how to track your portfolio, compare metals, and stack privately.
How Much Gold Should You Own? Allocation in Practice
From the classic five to ten per cent rule to the permanent portfolio, a look at how investors size a metals allocation — and how to measure yours.
Insuring Your Bullion: What Actually Covers You
Most home insurance policies cap bullion cover at a figure well below what a modest stack is worth. Many stackers discover this after a burglary.
Who Sets the Gold Spot Price, and How
There is no single official gold price. There is a benchmark auction, a futures market, a vast over-the-counter market, and a lot of derived feeds.
Gold Bars vs Gold Coins: Which Should You Buy?
The oldest question in bullion. The answer depends less on the metal and more on how and when you expect to sell.
Dollar Cost Averaging Into Gold and Silver
Buying the same dollar amount every month removes the hardest part of stacking: deciding when. But bullion has quirks that equity investors never face.
Copper as an Investment: What Stackers Should Know
Dr Copper has a doctorate in economics, or so the saying goes. It is also bulky, low-value by weight and a poor fit for physical stacking.
How to Spot Fake Gold and Silver Bullion
Counterfeits have improved dramatically. Here are the tests that still work, the ones that do not, and the purchasing habits that make the question moot.
How to Buy Gold Online Without Getting Burned
Most online bullion dealers are entirely legitimate. The ones that are not follow a recognisable pattern — and so do the mistakes buyers make.
How Much of a Portfolio Should Be Metals?
Five per cent? Ten? Twenty-five? The honest answer depends on what you want the metal to do — and most people never articulate that.
Cost Basis and Record Keeping for Bullion
Nobody enjoys record keeping, but the stacker who kept receipts always sells better than the one who did not. Here is the minimum viable system.
The Gold-to-Silver Ratio, and How Stackers Use It
One number, two metals, and a surprising amount of disagreement about what it means. A practical look at the gold-to-silver ratio.
Junk Silver: A Practical Guide for Stackers
It is neither junk nor a novelty. Circulated silver coinage is one of the cheapest ways to accumulate real metal — provided you understand fineness, melt value and premiums.
Best Silver Coins and Bars for Stackers
Silver premiums are proportionally far higher than gold premiums, which makes product choice much more consequential. Here is how the main options compare.
The Best Gold Coins to Buy: A Stacker’s Comparison
Six of the world’s most traded gold bullion coins, compared honestly on what actually matters: premium over spot, global liquidity and ease of resale.
Gold Purity Explained: 24K, 22K, 18K and Fineness
Karat, fineness, millesimal marks and hallmarks — a plain-English guide to how pure your gold is and what that means for its value.
Gold Price Per Gram: How to Work It Out Yourself
Spot prices are quoted per troy ounce, but most of the world buys and sells gold by the gram. Here is the arithmetic, and the purity adjustment almost everyone forgets.
Best Gold Portfolio Tracker App in 2026: What to Look For
A buyer’s guide to choosing a gold and precious metals portfolio tracker in 2026 — the features that matter, and how BullionTally compares to popular alternatives like Goldfolio.
Gold Spot Price vs Premium: What You Actually Pay Explained
Why the price you pay for a gold coin is higher than the spot price — and how to tell whether a dealer’s premium is fair.
How to Track Your Precious Metals Portfolio (2026 Guide)
Everything you need to know to keep an accurate, up-to-date record of your physical stack — purchases, premiums, spot prices and real-time value.
How to Store Physical Precious Metals Safely
Home safes, bank boxes or professional vaulting? A practical look at the trade-offs of storing physical precious metals securely.
How to Read Candlestick Charts for Gold and Silver
What those green and red candles actually mean — and how to use candlestick charts to read gold and silver price trends.
Troy Ounces vs Grams: Precious Metals Weights Explained
Why a troy ounce isn’t the same as a kitchen ounce — and how to convert between grams, ounces and kilos when buying metal.
Is Silver a Good Investment in 2026?
The bull case, the risks and the gold-to-silver ratio — a balanced look at silver as an investment in 2026.
Gold vs Silver vs Platinum vs Palladium: Which to Stack?
Four metals, four very different personalities. Here is how gold, silver, platinum and palladium compare — and how stackers think about mixing them.
Platinum and Palladium: The Overlooked Precious Metals
Rarer than gold and driven by industry — why platinum and palladium deserve a look in a diversified precious metals portfolio.
Why Privacy Matters for Precious Metals Investors
Physical metal is one of the few truly private assets left. Here is why the way you track it matters just as much as the metal itself.
A working library for precious metals stackers
Most writing about gold and silver falls into one of two camps. Either it is a market commentary aimed at traders who will never touch a physical coin, or it is a sales page dressed up as education. Neither is much use to somebody who has a safe at home, a growing pile of metal and a genuine question about how to look after it.
This library is written for the second group. Every article here is built around a practical decision a physical holder actually faces: how to convert a spot price into the value of the bar in your hand, whether coins or bars make more sense for the way you buy, what a fair premium looks like, how to spot a counterfeit, how to insure a collection and how to keep records that survive a decade of accumulation.
Where to start
If you are new to stacking, begin with the pieces that explain pricing. Understanding the difference between the spot price and the premium you pay is the single largest determinant of whether you buy well over a lifetime, and it takes about ten minutes to learn. From there, the product guides on gold coins, silver coins and bars will help you decide what to accumulate.
If you have been holding metal for years, the record keeping, insurance and allocation articles are more likely to change something. Long-time holders rarely have a product problem. They have a documentation problem, and it only becomes visible when they try to sell, make a claim or hand the collection on.
Alongside the writing, you can check the live gold price, silver price, platinum, palladium and copper pages, see all five side by side on the prices overview, or find a bullion dealer near you.
How this connects to the app
BullionTally is a portfolio tracker for people who own physical metal. You log what you bought, what you paid and where it is, and the app values it against live spot prices in your own currency. Your holdings are stored on your device, there is no mandatory account, and your portfolio data is never sold or shared.
The free tier is ad supported through Google AdMob and the app uses standard analytics to understand crashes and usage. Upgrading to Pro removes the ads. We are deliberately clear about that rather than claiming to be tracker free, because you deserve an accurate answer about what runs on your phone.