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ResourcesThailand Real Estate & Property LawTitleThai Gold: What Is The Weight and Measure of a Baht?

Thai Gold: What Is The Weight and Measure of a Baht?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thai gold and I am making this video because I am kind of an avid Thai gold enthusiast, I will call it that. Some people would call me a gold bug. I always hesitate to think in terms of investing in gold in any way. I like gold and I am not saying I am like Scrooge McDuck, I have tons and tons of gold, but I am just, gold bug might not be a terrible term for me, I just find gold rather interesting. 

I have had some clients recently in person tell me "You know, you really ought to maybe think about doing some YouTube videos on Thai gold because people don't really understand it to the extent that you look at it because I think Thai gold, perhaps by outsiders or folks that haven't been to Thailand is sort of viewed I hesitate to use the term "inferior" but it is sort of viewed as "well it is not the same as International Standard". That is true but when you understand it, the differences and the uniqueness of Thai gold, it actually makes it in my opinion in some ways better for lack of a better term if you want to look at it as that kind of comparison but in some ways better than International standard weight and measure gold. 

Now that stated, I think that statement of "better" is highly dependent on whether or not your center of gravity is in and around Southeast Asia and greater Thailand. We made this video to discuss “What is Baht weight?” A lot of folks asked me they say “Thai baht”. Now everybody knows Thai baht, they know money, the currency but Baht also describes a weight and measure of gold. When you buy gold in Thailand traditionally in a Thai gold shop, you will do that in weights and measures. The main weight measure is the Baht weight and then from there you may have fractions of the Baht weight or you may have exponential amounts of Baht weight gold. So what is a Baht?  Well it is also sometimes called a "tical". That is kind of the old school. I have read that a lot in treatises or in information describing the colonialists who were out here. The British colonies when they would interact with the Thais or the French, they would sometimes use the "tical" but Baht is interchangeable with that. It is a unit of weight specifically for Thai gold. 

One Baht equals 15.244 g. Standard purity of Thai gold is 96.5%. Now that is different than 99.9% Thai gold. The actual gold content of one Baht by weight is 15.224 X 0.95965 so that equals 14.71046 g. In terms of troy ounces, that would come out to 0.473 troy ounces. The other thing to keep in mind is 15.244 g is used for bullion. For jewelry it is more like 15.16 g when you are talking about Baht weight gold. 

Again the other thing to keep in mind is you could look at this from the standpoint of bullion or look at it from the standpoint of jewelry. There is Thai gold that is jewelry form, there is Thai gold that is Baht weight just in little blocks. They are little pieces of Thai gold and sometimes you can go all the way up from 1 to 5; there are different measurements of Baht and there are even segments of Baht. There is a "saleung”; a quarter of a Baht. So there are different ways of measuring out the Thai Baht. 

With respect to Thai gold as a an investment vehicle for lack of better term and I don't really want to get into the notion of investment in Thai gold, but as a vehicle for maintaining value relative to currency, I am not going to get into too much in this video but while the Baht weight is not the same thing as 1 oz. and purity of 1 oz. of International standard weight and measure gold, there are issues with respect to fungibility and I will make another video on this channel regarding fungibility of gold and issues surrounding Thai gold shops. For now I just want to make a quick video regarding the Baht weight measure of gold in the Kingdom of Thailand.