180 days of gold prices: it fell more often than it rose, and still ended up

We have been recording gold rates for Indian cities every day. Six months of that is now enough to answer questions the daily rate cannot, so we went back through it: 180 days, 28 March to 23 September 2026, 24K gold, national median.

The headline is a contradiction. Gold fell on more days than it rose, and still finished higher.

	Days	Average move
Rose	72 (40%)	+₹143 per gram
Fell	79 (44%)	−₹124 per gram
Unchanged	28 (16%)	—

Adding it all up: rises contributed ₹10,309 a gram, falls took away ₹9,789, and gold ended ₹520 higher — from ₹14,812 to ₹15,332, a gain of 3.5%.

So the falls were more frequent but smaller. A market can go up while going down more often than not, and anyone tracking whether today was red or green is reading the least informative number available.

The path mattered far more than the destination

A 3.5% gain over six months sounds placid. It was not.

Month	Start	End	Change
April	₹15,300	₹15,278	−0.1%
May	₹15,065	₹15,709	+4.3%
June	₹15,627	₹14,018	−10.3%
July	₹14,083	₹14,460	+2.7%
August	₹14,427	₹15,677	+8.7%
September (to 23rd)	₹15,693	₹15,332	−2.3%

The worst stretch was a fall of 13.6%, from ₹16,233 a gram on 14 May to ₹14,018 on 25 June. On ten grams that is ₹22,150 of value gone in six weeks.

The period high was ₹16,397 on 24 August. Our last reading, 23 September, was ₹15,332 — 6.5% below that high. Gold spent 48 of the 180 days below where it started.

None of that shows up in "gold is up 3.5% this half-year", and all of it would have mattered to someone buying in a particular week.

What an ordinary day looks like

Strip out the drama and the typical day is small:

• The average daily move was ₹112 a gram, in either direction — 0.73% of the price
• On a 10-gram purchase, that is about ₹1,123 a day
• 35 of the 179 days moved more than ₹200 a gram; only 7 moved more than ₹400
• The biggest single-day rise was +₹802 on 13 May; the biggest fall −₹753 on 11 June
• The longest unbroken run of falls was 5 days; the longest run of rises, 4

That last pair is worth sitting with. Gold did not trend in the way a chart with a smoothed line suggests. It never fell for a week straight, and it never rose for a week straight. It chopped.

Is there a best day of the week to buy?

This is one of the most searched questions about gold in India, so we checked it directly. Here is every weekday across the 180 days:

Day	Average move	Median move	Days it fell
Monday	−₹24	−₹30	16 of 26
Tuesday	−₹16	−₹14	15 of 26
Wednesday	+₹61	−₹0.50	13 of 26
Thursday	−₹7	+₹22	12 of 25
Friday	−₹16	+₹18	12 of 25
Saturday	+₹18	+₹1	11 of 25
Sunday	+₹3	₹0	0 of 26

Read the Wednesday row carefully, because it is the whole lesson. The average says +₹61, which looks like a clear signal. The median says −₹0.50. One number is being dragged around by a couple of large days; the other says a typical Wednesday did nothing at all. Every weekday in that table sits inside the noise.

There is no best day of the week to buy gold. Six months is not proof of the absence of a pattern, but it is enough to say that if a weekday edge existed at the size people hope for, it would be visible here, and it is not.

The one genuine pattern is Sunday: 23 of 26 Sundays were completely flat. Rates are not revised on a Sunday. That is not an opportunity, just a fact about when the number changes.

Does waiting for a dip work?

Here the data says something uncomfortable, in both directions.

For every day in the period, we asked whether a cheaper day turned up within the next 30. The answer was yes on 131 of 150 days — 87%.

That sounds like a clear instruction: wait, and gold will be cheaper within the month. Be careful with it. It is measured with hindsight, in a market that happened to be choppy around a mild uptrend, and it says nothing about how much cheaper or whether you would have recognised the dip while standing in it. The same six months contained a month that rose 8.7% and a month that fell 10.3%, and nobody knew which was starting.

The practical reading is narrower and more useful: if your purchase has no deadline, there is usually no hurry. If it does have a deadline — a wedding, a festival, a gift — the deadline wins. A date on an invitation is fixed; the rate is not, and trying to outwait a 0.73% daily wobble is not a plan.

Silver was the more restless metal

Over the same 180 days, silver rose 2.0%, from ₹245 to ₹249.90 a gram — a smaller gain than gold's 3.5%. But it got there less smoothly:

	Average daily move, as % of price
24K gold	0.73%
Silver	1.11%

Silver moved half again as much as gold on a typical day while ending up less. The gold-to-silver ratio widened slightly, from 60.5 to 61.4 — it took a little more silver to buy a gram of gold at the end than at the start.

For anyone treating silver as a cheaper substitute for gold, that is the thing to know: it is cheaper per gram, not calmer.

What we would take from six months of this

Ignore the daily direction. A green day and a red day are both about ₹112 a gram, and the market fell more often than it rose while going up. Today's arrow tells you nothing.

Compare across weeks, not days. The differences that changed real purchase costs happened over four to six weeks — a 10.3% month, an 8.7% month — not overnight.

Do not time a dated purchase. If the wedding is in November, buy when you can, ideally in parts rather than all at once.

Watch 24K only. As we covered in our post on purity, 22K and 18K are fixed fractions of 24K and moved by exactly the same 3.5%. Three numbers, one market.

You can see the current rate for your city on our city pages, each with its own chart, and work out any weight with the calculator.

Frequently asked questions

Will the gold price go down? Nobody knows, and any site that tells you otherwise is guessing. What we can say from measurement is that over our last 180 days gold fell on 44% of days, and a cheaper day appeared within a month 87% of the time — while still ending the period 3.5% higher.

What is the best day of the week to buy gold? There isn't one. Across 180 days, every weekday's typical move was inside the noise. Sunday is the only day with a real pattern: rates are not revised, so 23 of 26 Sundays were flat.

How much does gold move in a day? About ₹112 a gram on average, or roughly ₹1,123 on ten grams. Moves above ₹400 a gram happened 7 times in 179 days.

Was gold more stable than silver? Yes. Gold's average daily move was 0.73% of its price against silver's 1.11%, and gold gained more over the period.

Should I buy gold all at once or in parts? Buying in parts spreads you across several prices instead of betting on one, which matters more when a 13.6% swing is possible in six weeks. For a dated purchase it also removes the temptation to wait too long.

Figures in this post are national medians from our own daily collection, 28 March to 23 September 2026, and describe what happened rather than what will. Nothing here is investment advice. Today's rate is on the home page.