If you buy $100,000 of RAM and just hoard them, and a shortage happens, you won't update their value according to their market price, until you sell them.
That's it. It has nothing to do with whether your RAM is stored in New York or Paris.
If you're a retail business that sells RAM then yes, this is the way.
If you're a fund that holds RAM in some indirect manner (like you hold hypothetical RAM futures) then it depends on whether your country's laws ask for market-to-market value for that specific kind of security.
Bank of France "transported" their reserve by selling the gold held in New York, and subsequently buying the same amount in European market.
They opted to do so because it's just more efficient. It takes a lot of efforts to physically move 129 tonnes of gold after all. And as a side effect of this relocation project, they ended up recording a capital gain. It's nothing-burger.
For context, in 2025H1, 480 tons where moved from CH to the US (I assume originating from UK after being recast).
My guess is that the choice to sell rather than transport was also due to using the (at the time) price divergence between US and European markets. (arbitrage + not having to pay transport + refining)
Let's say I bought a 100-ounce gold bar in 1965, when gold was $35/oz, for a total price of $3500. Let's say I sold it today at $4700/oz, for a total price of $470,000. That gives me a gain of $466,500.
And let's say that I regret it. I decide that I really want to hold some gold, so I take the $470,000 and buy another 100-ounce gold bar.
The situation was that I had a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of $3500. Now the situation is that I have a gold bar worth $470,000 with a taxable basis of $470,000, and I owe the IRS taxes on $466,500 of capital gains.
TL;DR: Selling and re-buying the same asset gives you the accumulated gains, and resets the price basis.
They had gold worth X to the market but X minus 11 billion on paper. So when France accounted for its gold in euro terms they would say they have X minus 11 billion Euros worth of gold.
Now they still have the same amount of gold but they "realized" a gain of 11 billion. They don't have that much cash left after the repurchase but now they say they have X Euros worth of gold which is 11 billion more than before.
So no they didn't make a profit from this as gold is higher on both sides of the Atlantic than last time they did their accounting updates.
No, it becomes realized when it is sold. They held a bunch of gold that appreciated in value. On paper, they became richer. By selling it that became realized. After that, they bought gold again (different type elsewhere but it doesn't matter). That did not make them any poorer; they just converted cash to gold.
It's just accounting terms. They have to show it in their annual reports (afaiu they have to take into accounts unrealized losses, and realized gains, it's the case for many companies as well -- eg it came up with some Bitcoin treasury companies).
No. Firstly the gain is to a certain extent a matter of accounting. The most accurate method of accounting is “mark to market”. So if you have some gold and you think in dollars, then every day you look at how much gold you have and you look at the price of gold in dollars, you multiply the two and the difference between that value and the value you got to the previous day is your “mark to market pnl”.[1] This means you have a very accurate valuation for your asset but the downside of this approach is that your pnl is very volatile as the gold price moves around. This is the approach taken for most assets by most wall st firms. In fact at JPMC and Goldman it’s not stretching a point too far to say mark to market is nearly a religion. In this methodology there is no such thing as “unrealised” pnl.
Another approach is “historical cost” or “cost basis” accounting. In this approach you officially hold assets at the price you bought them, and only realise pnl when you dispose of them. This means you don’t get pnl volatility from marking to market and then you get a big lump of pnl when you sell.[2] Until you sell or otherwise crystalize the pnl, the profit is “unrealised”, which is just an imaginary amount that you may or may not get but you look at in your brokerage statement and smile if it’s green or frown if it’s red. The advantage of this method is you don’t get the pnl volatility and you can wait until an advantageous moment to take the profits. The downside is if you want to, you can deceive yourself by holding these assets at a valuation that is unrealistic and store up pnl pain for the future. This methodology caused a lot of problems in the 2008 crisis with institutions holding bonds at prices that they could never hope to sell them.[3]
“Moving” the gold from NYC to Paris may not (for practical reasons) have involved actually physically taking the bars from one place to another. They may have found a buyer in NYC and then bought some bars on the IME in London and had them delivered to Paris. (This would clearly have required crystalizing the profit if they were holding them at historical cost). It sounds from a brief read of the article as if the bars were in some non-standard format so they may have had them melted down and recast, which would have required an assay and so would have triggered a new valuation, realising the profit. Assuming they were holding them at historical cost, which it sounds like they were.
[1] Technically, if you sell some gold during the day, then the pnl on the portion you sold is “trading pnl” and the pnl on the remainder is “mark to market” but whatever. It’s pretty much the same for the French reserve bank which has gold and thinks in EUR, except they not only have gold MTM pnl but also FX pnl in the EUR/USD rate (because gold prices in USD but they think in EUR).
[2] Or do some other event which requires valuation. There are rules about this kind of thing.
[3] When Lehman collapsed they had bonds marked at 100 that were trading at less than 40 cents. One weekend I’ll never forget I got a call from a very senior partner and was asked to value the European part of that portfolio as part of the US regulators frantic attempts to find a buyer for Lehman before the market opened.
Would it count as a "political reason" if their risk management calculations crossed a threshold where it's worth it to move the gold back? I imagine such calculations are done and revised all the time and account for the perceived stability and reliability of a country.
A gain of $15b? That's roughly the value of 100 metric tons of gold, remarkably close to the 129 tons that the article says was moved... did they double the value of their gold?
When something is "realized" is a matter of accounting. It means to make the change, they sold the gold fo currrency, then bought it back. For many of us, realizing a gain is when taxes happen, though I'm not sure what it means for a nation state.
This doesn't make sense. If they first sold the bars held in the US, then the gold prices rose, then they bought gold in Europe, how the hell did that amount to a capital gain of $15b? How exactly do prices rising over the course of the process lead to these $15b?
First thought: Maybe they bought the gold first? Or the gold price was at a temporary high when they sold it?
Second thought: The numbers don't seem to check out: 129t are 4,147,456.307 troy ounces (1 troy ounce = 31.1034768 g). The total gains of 15e9 USD would thus correspond to gains of $3,616.68 per troy ounce, which seems excessively high, given that today's gold price is at ~$4,712. Even if they sold everything at the current all-time high of $5,589.38 on January 28 (and that's a big if), they would have had to buy for not more than $1,972.70, a price we last had in fall 2023.
Imagine they bought the gold in the US for 1b and sold for 16b. Yes they turned around and purchased 16b of order gold immediately but there's was still a transaction where they sold an asset for more than they bought it.
If you bought your house for $500k 20 years ago, sold it today for a million, then bought it again tomorrow for a million, would you describe that to your friends as having just made $500k? Like yes in the most pedantic technical accounting way it's a gain. In spirit I would call this an unrealized gain
No, you’d remark that your house has appreciated in value over the past 20 years. But you wouldn’t have realized any of that gain until you sold the house - the point being that the realization is the actual taxable event, which is why it matters from the pedantic technical accounting POV. The fact that you turned around and bought another house just means you’re doing something new with your realized gains. Now you have a new cost basis. Maybe that’s what you’re saying with “unrealized gain” though.
Sure in the spirit it's an unrealized gain but wouldn't the tax man consider it a realized $500K capital gain? seemingly this is would be the more appropriate way of categorizing it?
It's more that the english ain't parsing, for some at least.
The mining.com quote is classic weasel phrasing, seemingly meaningful yet disturbingly ambiguous:
Due to rising gold prices, the move helped the bank to generate a capital gain of 13 billion euros ($15 billion), bringing it to a net profit of 8.1 billion euros for the 2025 financial year after a net loss of 7.7 billion euros in 2024.
So, the move helped the bank generate ...
Just as, say, one guy helped four others push a car back up on the road.
We've been given, accurately or not .. likely true, figures on how the bank did over a period, we've also been told the gold movements helped with that ... so they almost certainly kicked in at least $1.
The claim is that rising gold prices lead to gains of $15b. As in they started with 129 tons of gold in the US, then they sold that and bought gold in Europe, and in the end, due to rising gold prices, they had 129 tons of gold in Paris plus $15b extra cash. Please explain a hypothetical course of events which makes this plausible.
Keep in mind that 129 tons of gold is worth just a bit more than $15b, so small market fluctuations on the scale of 10% isn't enough by itself.
They purchased 129 tons of gold in Europe. Their asset position did not change: they converted cash to gold of the same value.
They then sold the 129 tons gold in the US vaults for $16 billion. That gold was originally purchased I'm guessing many decades ago for $1 billion. The have a book profit of $15 billion and still have 129 tons of gold.
They captured some of the appreciation in gold value as a realised profit on their books.
Their balance sheet did not change, just their income statement
What do you mean when you say "run"? Low graphics 45 FPS at 720p? Or ultra graphics 120 FPS at 4k? My assumption is that a fairly large part of that space is inaccessible with the integrated GPU.
remote GPU compute payloads have been around a lot longer than LLMs, they're just few and far between.
folding@home and other such asynchronous "get this packet of work done and get back to me' style of operations rarely care much about latency.
Remote transcoding efforts can usually adjust whatever buffer needed to cover huge latency gaps , a lot of sim and render suites can do remote work regardless of machine to machine latency..
I just sort of figure the industry will trend more async when latency becomes a bigger issue than compute. Won't work in some places, but I think we tend to avoid thinking that way right now due to a lack of real need to do so; but latency is one of those numbers that trends down slowly.
How do you differentiate between something that "happens to work due to an implementation detail" and a "proper feature that's specified to work" in a language without a specification?
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